Re: [boost] 1.35 release approach (was [1.34.0] Deadline)

From: Jeff Garland (jeff_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-04-30 21:05:42

Thomas Witt wrote:
> In article <624789.81580.qm_at_[hidden]> Cromwell Enage
> <sponage_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> 
>> A few somewhat-recently accepted libraries (e.g. ASIO,
>> Fusion, Interprocess, MPI, PropertyTree) are available
>> in both the beta distribution and via CVS but are not
>> advertised in either libs/libraries.htm or
>> doc/html/index.html; will their presence at least be
>> announced in the news section of the home page during
>> the official release?
> 
> As of now there is no such plan. They are not part of the official release
> and as such are not mentioned in the docs.
> 

To clarify, none of the listed libraries are in the beta distribution I have. 
  And property tree isn't in CVS yet AFAICS.

Most of these libraries should be in 1.35, which will hopefully be released 
'quickly'.  By quickly, I mean ~1.5 months...which means a beta release 1 
month  after 1.34.  Yep, that's right, I think we need to set some very hard 
goals to re-energize the boost release process. After the '1.34 experience' 
I've become even more of an advocate a hard line release approach. That is, we 
should set the deadline and only accept code that can make it in the release 
timeframe -- if it's not ready then we take it out and let it slide to the 
next release.

To minimize risk of delay and release the pent-up backlog of new libraries I 
believe we should hold all existing 1.34 libs constant and only add in new 
libraries that are basically ready to go now.  I've actually done an 'alpha 
test' of this approach and it looks like this will work -- that is, most of 
the unreleased libraries can be build against a 1.34 core without dependencies 
on changes to existing libraries (there are a few minor exceptions).  Behind 
the scenes I've been encouraging developers of new libs to get their code into 
CVS so we will be ready to begin the nano-second after 1.34 ships.

Now, I realize that we have a plan to switch to subversion and have a new 
process that has been developed by Beman, etc. But it's my view that we should 
pursue a CVS based approach because it requires zero time to implement.  In 
the meantime the subversion conversion can proceed in parallel.  When 
everything is 100% ready to go we switch.  My worry is that the conversion of 
regression testing, developers, and all other release process changes will 
wind up delaying 1.35 by several months.  Of course, if my pessimism is 
misplaced then we can switch to subversion for the 1.35 release.  Nothing will 
have been lost because we will have been testing new libs for 1.35 anyway.

I believe this is urgent because a major backlog of unreleased Boost code has 
now developed.  The asio review was 1.5 years ago -- it's hard to fathom that 
it's not in a release yet.  It's simply not acceptable to wait even 3 months 
more to get asio and other 'new' libs into a boost release.  And besides, asio 
and the libs above are really just the short list: there's xpressive, GIL, 
bimap, accumulators, function types, and units that have been accepted now -- 
huge and important libraries.  And it's not stopping, there's a review 
backlog, a pile of SoC projects, etc.  We have to dramatically shorten the 
release cycle to get these libraries out into a release.

Jeff