Re: [boost] quat and oct ported to MSVC6

From: David Abrahams (david.abrahams_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-05-01 17:25:44

----- Original Message -----
From: "Hubert HOLIN" <Hubert.Holin_at_[hidden]>
> Paris (U.E.), le 01/05/2002
>
> Uh?
>
> I DO monitor the list, in particular so as to respond to any query
> about my contributions. It is true, however that for various reasons,
I
> tend to lag by a few days from the latest postings.

Hi Hubert, thanks for replying.

No insult was intended, and I probably should've given you a few more
days before posting that. We have had several people posting patches
recently that weren't responded to, and I first posted the comment below
in response to a different issue with boost::any. I wasn't trying to
imply that you were being unresponsive, though I can see how my post
came off that way; my apologies. I am *mostly* just trying to raise the
issue of how we should administrate boost (though I was also hoping to
raise an acknowledgement of receipt of the patch from you ;->). My point
was that although you are the library's author and rightly assumed to be
the maintainer, we have no formal notion that someone is ongoingly
responsible for a library, and that the task of making sure that someone
is listening to each maintenance issue raised is just one of many
incidental jobs that are more than the moderators can handle.

> Unresponsive strikes me as somewhap peculiar, as I believe I was for
> the latest round of modifications (01/02/2002). Or perhaps three month
> of stability makes a library stale?
>
> Not all the work that is being done around the library is necessarilly
> plublicised (I am working on a link with PETE, for instance),

Cool!

> I do not
> believe that it makes the library "unmaintained". Some of it is
pending
> upon the work of others (such as the incorporation of SPIRIT, to
> simplify the input operators, or the incorporation of a matrix library
> to move some of the things currently in the examples to the library
> proper), so there is nothing else to do there but wait (and perhaps
help
> the others in their efforts).

That sounds exciting. BTW, there was one strong request at the C++
committee meeting for standardization of some quaternion type.

> At any rate, I was under the impression that the authors of library
> were supposed to be their maintainers,

That's the informal procedure.

> unless they stated they could no
> longer be considered such. I was not under the impression that more
> formalism was needed there.

Requests and patches come in all the time. Some get missed because
people are busy, away on vacation, or just lose track of the message.
Sometimes boost developers drift away and stop maintaining their code.
Sometimes libraries get significant changes from people other than their
original developer. There's no clear contact point for any given
library. Now somebody (like me) has to watch the thread of each one of
these requests to make sure it's followed up on. There's no way to know
who to contact if the request languishes.

The above may not seem like a big deal, and perhaps they aren't.
However, put enough issues like that together and boost becomes very
difficult to manage.

Regards,
Dave