Re: [boost] [process] Formal Review starts today, 27 October

Subject: Re: [boost] [process] Formal Review starts today, 27 October
From: Klemens Morgenstern (klemens.morgenstern_at_[hidden])
Date: 2016-11-04 18:44:55

Am 04.11.2016 um 23:17 schrieb Edward Diener:
> On 10/27/2016 2:26 AM, Antony Polukhin wrote:
>> Dear Boost community,
>>
>> The formal review of Klemens David Morgenstern's Process library
>> begins today, 27th October and ends on 5th November.
>>
>>  Process is a C++11 library to manage system processes. It can be 
>> used to:
>> * create child processes
>> * setup streams for child processes
>> * communicate with child processes through streams (synchronously or
>> asynchronously)
>> * wait for processes to exit (synchronously or asynchronously)
>> * terminate processes
>>
>> Full documentation with examples and tutorial is available at
>> http://klemens-morgenstern.github.io/process/index.html
>> Stable source codes for review are available at
>> https://github.com/klemens-morgenstern/boost-process/tree/boost_review
>> Latest source codes available at
>> https://github.com/klemens-morgenstern/boost-process
>>
>>
>> We encourage your participation in this review. At a minimum, kindly 
>> state:
>> - Whether you believe the library should be accepted into Boost
>>   * Conditions for acceptance
>> - Your knowledge of the problem domain
>>
>> You are strongly encouraged to also provide additional information:
>> - What is your evaluation of the library's:
>>   * Design
>>   * Implementation
>>   * Documentation
>>   * Tests
>>   * Usefulness
>> - Did you attempt to use the library? If so:
>>   * Which compiler(s)
>>   * What was the experience? Any problems?
>> - How much effort did you put into your evaluation of the review?
>>
>>
>> We await your feedback!
>
> I vote to accept the Process library.
>
> I highly suggest that the documentation be expanded beyond the 
> tutorial to provide topics explaining all the major areas of the 
> library. I don't feel that one-liner reference comments even come 
> close to explain all the areas that the library covers. As an example 
> of this I hunted in the reference to find that the library provides 
> low-level access in its environment.hpp header to the process ID and 
> the native process handle, but even here any explanation for what else 
> is in the header, as well as its meaning, is almost non-existent. It 
> always baffles me when a developer provides useful functionality in 
> his library but does not bother to explain what that functionality 
> entails. Is it laziness ? Is it tiredness ? Is it an inability to 
> write a few coherent sentences in English because of lack of education 
> or that English is not the developer's native language ? I just don't 
> know.
Ouch. Well I can't hide behind the language card after demonstrating 
that I'm rather able to write in english on the mailing list. The 
assumption is: if you use environment.hpp you already no what this is 
supposed to do, since you read the OS documentation. The reason for that 
is that I was familiar with this stuff when I started to use 
boost.process 0.5. If you know that much, I think the documentation does 
suffice. But I would also be insincere if I claimed that writing 
documentation is my favorite thing in the world.
But since this was now critized by many, I will add a chapter explaining 
all those concepts, i.e. pipes, environment, process groups and a bit of 
asio.
>
> On the plus side the library provides basic useful functionality for 
> what a process library should provide in a cross-platform way. I 
> especially like the idea that the library is focused on this basic 
> functionality and that the syntax for using that functionality is 
> clear and easy to use. I also like the idea that the library relies on 
> already established Boost functionality in asio for accomplishing more 
> difficult tasks rather than trying to re-invent everything or trying 
> to provide more all-purpose interfaces which nobody can understand how 
> to use.
>
> The library is obviously very useful whenever the task of creating and 
> communicating with child processes needs to be done.
>
> I tested the basic functionality with VC++14, update 3, on Windows. 
> Everything worked as expected.
>
> My effort was a few hours of reading documentation to understand what 
> the library entailed and a few hours to test it out. I have a great 
> deal of knowledge involving processes on Windows and only a small 
> amount of knowledge involving processes on Linux.
>
>
>
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