Re: A Follow Up to My Original Note Re The Future of Boost

From: Vinnie Falco (vinnie.falco_at_[hidden])
Date: 2024-08-01 13:16:07

On Thu, Aug 1, 2024 at 5:12 AM Andrey Semashev via Boost
<boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> My impression is that he is devoted to Boost, but rather emotional and ambitious, and that may sometimes cloud his judgment.

That is fair, yet that energy is also the source of positive changes.

> I cannot be sure that his devotion to Boost won't change
> in the future or that he won't try to transform Boost into
> something that is not accepted by the wider Boost community.

The Alliance would be administering:

* The boost.org domain
* Related cloud services

The Alliance cannot "transform Boost" with this any more than the
Foundation could. We do not control the GitHub organization or the
library repositories. The new website has been licensed under the BSL
and donated. The idea that control of the domain equates to control
over Boost is not a serious one.

It is true that volunteers such as I can always decide to pack up and
go elsewhere, and this has always been the case for Boost. Libraries
become abandoned and require community maintenance. New volunteers are
needed, and Alliance efforts to revitalize Boost are made in the hopes
of bringing in more new contributors.

The Foundation's "devotion to Boost" has already changed, which shows
that a different bureaucratic structure is not necessarily better.

> Regarding The C++ Alliance organization, its mission statement
> (https://cppalliance.org/#mission) doesn't even mention Boost.

Mission statements don't really mean much. They aren't legally
enforceable and they can be changed at any time. The behavior over
time is more reflective of intent than verbal postures. We could
update the Alliance mission statement if you want...

> In fact, it focuses on C++ advancement in general

Yes and I believe that C++ is advanced best by investing in Boost. It
used to be the place where people submitted new libraries intended for
the standard. It should be again, as Boost's development process is
more aligned with users' interests. That is why the Alliance focuses
all of its resources on Boost.

> On the Boost Foundation side, I feel that its execution is far from perfect.

I can understand why. The Boost community of volunteers is... well,
let's say "difficult." Doing big things is a giant pain in the ass,
which I very much have first-hand experience with. And Boost needs big
things. Foundation board members are understandably only able to
devote a handful of hours a month to Boost, as they have regular jobs
needed to put food on the table. The Alliance has a natural advantage
here as its staff engineers work full-time on Boost.

> Boost Foundation, as
> the owner of the infrastructure elements, should have been more
> proactive in exposing and solving the ongoing issues with it - whether
> by seeking volunteers in the community or hiring external staff.

There is no simple infrastructure fix, and a volunteer did step
forward: the Alliance. The new website we have developed, is not
merely a UI change. It implements all of the backend requirements
needed to support Boost such as the commit-bot, updated release
scripts, the mailman3 upgrade, and so forth.

Thanks