Re: [boost] There's a serious problem with the Boost Community :(

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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