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Subject: Re: [boost] There's a serious problem with the Boost Community :(
From: Rene Rivera (grafikrobot_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-07-31 21:22:41
Vladimir Prus wrote:
> Jon Biggar wrote:
>
>> That said, here's the problem: simple patches submitted languish without
>> action or response for far too long. I submitted a patch for bjam
>> with ticket #2552 back in November, including test cases to verify that
>> it operates correctly. But despite requesting over several release
>> cycles since then, no action has been taken and I haven't even gotten a
>> response.
> ...
>> The Boost Community *really* needs a mechanism to ensure that patches
>> submitted are acknowledged, vetted, and if found worthy, integrated into
>> a release in a timely manner. Not doing so discourages contribution.
>
> The fundamental matter is that "Boost Community", or rather
> "Boost Developers Community" does not exist. With 90 libraries, no single
> person has enough knowledge to apply patches to all of them. In fact, it's
> not even possible to have a single person oversee issue workflow, like
> ensuring response within specific time. This might be a problem, but
> frankly, no open-source project I worked with generally has such procedures,
> for similar reasons.
>
> I am afraid that the only way to guarantee a patch is in is to ping it
> if it's not applied after reasonable time. While you have pinged it once,
> recently, unfortunately the person the issue is assigned to was on vacation.
Yep, being that person :-), I didn't notice the ping at all when I got
back this week. And unfortunately I won't have time for much Boost
related for some weeks, as I have this thing called "my wedding" to
worry about next week ;-)
But generally I agree that Boost has a problem as a meta-project. Even
though it looks like *one* project from the outside it's not. And not
managing it as one project is causing stuff to never get done. But this
is the story of most open-source, so not sure if there's anything that
can be done.
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