Re: [boost] Moving Boost.Thread forward

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-12-15 16:47:39

At 08:45 AM 12/15/2003, Michael Glassford wrote:

 >...
 >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.
 >

We clearly need to address the problem of getting Boost.Threads moving 
again, so many thanks for your posting.

I've privately emailed Bill Kempf to see what his status is. But regardless 
of the details, we need to start moving forward.

 >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.

While the details are hazy, one immediate objective would be some 
confidence building steps. For example, give us your views on patches that 
have been submitted by others. Which would you accept? change? reject? why? 
What patches of your own would you like to make? why? In other words, 
generally become active on the list so we can get a feel for your style of 
approaching the "contributing maintainer" job.

Also, are there any others who would like to step forward? It might help if 
there were several people working together.

Thanks again for getting the ball rolling,

--Beman