Re: [boost] asio status (was: 1.34 Release Plan)

From: Paul Baxter (pauljbaxter_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-01-26 05:58:40

> On Wed, 25 Jan 2006 08:08:58 -0800, Eric Niebler wrote
>> Dave Moore wrote:
>> > So , I guess these is no chance of asio making the deadline? 
>> > (Presuming it
>> > is accepted, of course)
>> >
>
> I'm sorry for the delay in the review results -- I hope to finish them 
> this
> week.
>
>> IF asio is accepted, every effort should be made to get it into the
>> next release. If there is any hope of getting a networking library
>> into C++0x, we need the usage experience now. (All IMHO, of course.)
>
> While I agree with the sentiment I find it unlikely that this could 
> happen. If
> accepted, there will surely be some set of changes before asio is 
> included.
> That process could take a substantial amount of time.  Even if there were 
> no
> changes it would probably take a month to get asio in...

If recent releases are anything to go by, we may desire a quick release but 
practically I'm expecting it to take 3+ months to get 1.34 out the door.
If asio is available in a month, I do think it can make it into 1.34 even if 
only as a 'preview'. It is such an important library.

I'm not complaining about the recent Boost release cycles; there is a 
fantastic amount of hard work and dedication by everyone, its just that 
Boost releases are so large and monolithic at present. I think perhaps too 
much for a single release manager co-ordinating a large number of 
volunteers.

While on the subject of releases, it has been mooted that perhaps Boost 
shouldn't be released as one monolithic package and that the problem might 
be better tackled by a finer grained approach and having a two-tier release 
management structure. Individual 'modules' are released upwards (and 
available as versioned outputs) and a main boost release is simply a 
collection of latest inter-operable set of versioned modules.

The aim is to spread the release management load but also to allow 
individual modules to support 'releases' more frequently than the top level.

Regards

Paul Baxter