[boost] Moving Boost.Thread forward

From: Michael Glassford (glassfordm_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-12-15 08:45:34

On 12/14/2003, Martin Wille wrote:

> I reported a Boost.Thread problem some time ago (the result of
> m_tss.set() is not checked by thread_safe_ptr<>); no response from
> the maintainer.

In another thread on 11/18/2003, David Abrahams wrote:

> Boost.Threads is languishing and its design has
> frankly become too important to be allowed to do so.

And in yet another thread on 8/21/2003, Hurd, Matthew wrote:

> Just wondering on the status of the thread_dev branch...
>
> I use rw_mutex a bit and was wondering when it might be set for
> officialdom. Very useful even in its dev state.
>
> Also, as an aside, is anybody able to point to the C++ committee's
> thoughts on concurrency and boost::threads in particular?

It appears that William Kempf (the Boost.Thread maintainer) has quietly
disappeared from the Boost list and from maintaining the Boost.Thread
library. There are a number of things in the Boost.Thread library that I and
others would like to see pushed forward, and I'm willing to volunteer some
time (unfortunately not as much as I'd like) to make this happen. I don't
feel that I'm well suited to become the maintainer of the library, since I'm
not a "threading expert" and particularly since I currently don't have the
knowledge to work on the pthread or Mac implementations, but I dare say I
could manage some bug fixes, could possibly move some of the changes that
are currently in the thread_dev branch into the release version, and could
try to keep the documentation up to date.

What I'm really interested in  doing, however, is getting the rw_mutex and
related classes that are in the thread_dev branch into releasable shape and
then getting them into a release; I think I can do this because I use them
and have invested a lot of time in understanding, cleaning up, and somewhat
improving them (though my changes are not in CVS and haven't even been
posted yet). After that, I'd be interested in getting the barrier class and
any other higher-level threading constructs that are in the thread_dev
branch released, as well as possibly adding a couple of other classes of my
own that I've been working on recently and am finding pretty useful in
certain situations.

So my question is: I'm interested in becoming a "contributing maintainer"
for the Boost.Thread library; what's the procedure? Though I've been
primarily a lurker in boost.devel, I've been following it closely for quite
a long time and don't recall a situation like this coming up before.

Mike