Review Results: Base-from-Member

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-08-14 15:28:43

Daryle Walker's Base-from-Member library is accepted by Boost subject to 
two caveats:

* Issues raised during the review be addressed, particularly Ed Brey's 
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/boost/message/15406.  (Note that Daryle has 
already dealt with some issues in an update in the files section.)

* The documentation needs to be modified to more clearly indicate that for 
some applications the best use of the library is not to #include the code 
directly, but to use it as a demonstration of how to hand-code the 
base-from-member idiom.

This last point is the key issue with Base-from-Member; some users will 
wish to view the library as a demonstration of the idiom or technique 
rather than as code they will always reuse.

This seems to me to require some explanation.  Some of the points are 
specific to Base-from-Member, such as "When is it better to hand code?", 
and so should be dealt with in the Base-from-Member docs.

But it also seems to me that Boost should have a page titled something like 
"Demonstration Libraries" which Base-from-Member and similar libraries can 
link to.  It would describe the concept that we reuse code when there is a 
good library code solution, but other times there is no applicable specific 
code, so instead we reuse code idioms and techniques (for small-scale 
problems), or we reuse design patterns (for large-scale problems).  Links 
to non-boost resources might also be appropriate.

Comments?

--Beman