[boost] 1.30.0 release postmortem

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-03-24 11:04:26

In many ways the preparation Boost 1.30.0 went very well, and the resulting 
release seems very high quality to me.

There were rough edges of course, and we'll try to make some improvements 
in coming months. Mostly just procedural stuff like making sure we have an 
active maintainer for all libraries, and getting maintainers to make major 
changes earlier in the process.

The worst problem seems to me to be that our bug and patch tracking is 
totally dysfunctional.

We enable the SourceForge tracking system, but then don't really use it. I 
never even looked at it during the release run up. When I have looked at it 
in the past, the fact that so many messages were anonymous meant that there 
was no way to ask for follow up information. It is also so far outside our 
current procedures that it just doesn't seem to fit.

Bjorn Karlsson and I, and perhaps others, keeps private do-lists as a 
release nears, and nag developers who don't seem to be making fixes, but 
this is a hit-or-miss approach which doesn't scale up to a project the size 
of Boost today.

The net effect is that user bug reports and patches are falling between the 
cracks. We need to do something about that, and do it soon so that we have 
a working system long before the next release. One that shows every Booster 
the current status of bugs and patches at any moment.

There was some discussion of a better tracking system once before, but I 
really think we need to get going on this now. The problems are much more 
serious.

What systems work for others in an Internet environment like Boost? Who 
could act as host? I see the GCC folks are migrating from GNATS to 
Bugzilla.

Thoughts?

--Beman