[boost] Library Maintainence - was 5 Observations ....

Subject: [boost] Library Maintainence - was 5 Observations ....
From: Robert Ramey (ramey_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-03-25 12:25:13

Paul A. Bristow wrote:

> If the maintainer appears missing (on holiday even), I'd favour
> quicker patching of bugs, after some discussion seeking agreement -
> or veto.

This would be a really bad idea in my opinion - for more than one reason.

Very often, what users characterise as "bugs" are really one of the 
following:

* error in user's code
* misunderstanding of error / warning messages
* result of choices made by the developers in the course of making tradeoffs
  between legimate optoins.
* intentional features of the design which are not appreciated by the 
"fixer"

In summary, many of the proposed "bug fixes" are not bugs but something
else and the proponent doesn't understand this.

almost all changes have or can have unexpected side effects in places
totally unexpected by the naive maintainer.

Most of the boost libraries address a huge number of issues "under the 
covers".
(That's what libraries are for)

Most of these fixes/patches are untested.  The proponent thinks he's tested
them because the "fix" made his program work.  But that's in no way
the same a running the test suite on all platformas and build variants.

The above are good reasons for running changes through a maintainer.
But the real reason is:

The current system makes one person responsable for maintaining
any given library and gives that person the autority required to
accept that responsability.

Once you give others the authority to mess with a library - the
maintainer cannot be held responsable for it's state.  Now that
he's been handed an impossible task - he'll just move on.
Result - no maintainer.

Robert Ramey