Re: [boost] Review: Boost Coding Guidelines

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-07-20 12:50:39

At 12:40 PM 7/20/2001, Darin Adler wrote:

 >On Friday, July 20, 2001, at 09:18  AM, David Abrahams wrote:
 >
 >> From: "Beman Dawes" <bdawes_at_[hidden]>
 >>
 >>> I think that Boost Coding Guidelines should be accepted, but subject 
to
 >>> refactoring into separate "Requirements" and "Guidelines" documents. 
The
 >>> refactoring should include material from the current "Library
 >>> Requirements
 >>> and Guidelines" page, http://www.boost.org/more/lib_guide.htm, and
 >>> perhaps
 >>> one or two other current pages.
 >>
 >> How will we decide which are requirements and which are guidelines?
 >
 >My two cents:
 >
 >By default make everything a guideline.

That's an interesting approach.  But there should be at least one 
exception:  Anything which is already a requirement in 
http://www.boost.org/more/lib_guide.htm stays a requirement.  There are 
only four coding requirements currently, all having to do with portability.

It should be possible to promote a few or the guidelines to be requirements 
if they are non-controversial.  For example, I'd like to see "ISO Standard 
C++" elevated to a requirement, although even for that we would want to add 
a caveat allowing non-standard extensions be used in alternate 
implementations.

 > Convert the entire document into
 >the guidelines document. Then as time allows, promote things to be
 >requirements. You and Beman can decide whether formal review is required
 >or not for your initial requirements documents with your best judgement
 >and depending on how many requirements you end up with and whether they
 >are things that were controversial in the guidelines review process.
 >
 >The requirements will presumably be a small set compared with the
 >extensive set of guidelines. We can always downgrade a requirement to a
 >guideline after the fact, if we decide it was a mistake.
 >
 >The issues are not the same as with code, where making a change after the 

 >library is accepted can easily result in incompatibilities for people
 >upgrading to a new version of the Boost libraries.

--Beman