Re: [boost] The problems with Boost development

Subject: Re: [boost] The problems with Boost development
From: James Mansion (james_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-03-21 05:00:10

Andrey Semashev wrote:
> It is much easier to ship a maintenance release of a single library 
> than of the whole Boost. Users will be able to compose their local 
> distributions of maintenance releases of libraries they use and thus 
> strive for stability.
Such a composition is not well tested (or even 'at all tested') and is 
itself suspect.

I think the proposal to have a monolithic stable core and then satellite 
libraries that mostly depend only on the core is a good one.  If a 
satellite is becoming a common dependency itself then that should be a 
criteria for promoting it to core.

In some respects I think the problem is library maintainers. Boost looks 
like 'a thing' from outsidee, but its actually a collection of seperate 
things that happen to share some namespace and a zip file.

I guess that a lot of bugs and patches sit in trac because the 
maintainer lacks time and everyone else defers to him (or her?).  It 
might be better if an executive team could take more responsibility for 
addressing such things if the original maintainer cannor keep up.

I'm not sure if Apache has the right model - the relatonship between APR 
and its dependents is OK, but commons is a mess.