Re: [boost] [1.43][beta] Fix for MPL under gcc 4.5

Subject: Re: [boost] [1.43][beta] Fix for MPL under gcc 4.5
From: Robert Ramey (ramey_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-04-23 02:40:22

Aleksey Gurtovoy wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Apr 2010 03:10:30 -0500, Daniel James <dnljms_at_[hidden]>
> wrote:
>> On 22 April 2010 04:43, Aleksey Gurtovoy <agurtovoy_at_[hidden]>
>> wrote:
>>> My experience as a release manager (admittedly from a long time
>>> ago) was that release-critical issues will slip past even the most
>>> active library maintainers, and letting them know about it (and
>>> occasionally nagging) goes a long way towards "all green" release.
>>
>> The release process is quite different now. It seems to me that the
>> focus is to get a regular release with the more modest goal of being
>> an incremental improvement, rather than an 'all green' release.
>
> Like Robert, I don't see a conflict here. The "all green" part is
> exactly about incremental improvement: it says "this release is not
> worse than the previous one, except for these known issues". It was
> simply a concise, objective, easy-to-track and easy-to-explain
> criterion to keep us on track towards that goal.

I can't resist picking a tiny nit here. I would just say
"this release is better than the previous one."  If that's not
true we shouldn't make new release.  And I believe we've
been doing exactly this.  The current situation illustrates
this very well in that the main problem has been very
recent new release of compilers we are commited to support.
And these releases are less than a month old!!!
That this is the only problem (that I can see) tells me that
things are working quite well.

I see boost constantly improving.  The number of bugs we
know about tends to increase so it might not look that way.
The number of bugs we actually have is decreasing. So
things ARE getting very good.  Note that I'm assuming
that the number of new bugs introduced is only a very
small number of bugs reported.  I believe this to be true.

Also the elapsed time between the time a bug is reported,
isolated and appears fixed in the boost deployment has shortened
to 3 months for many libraries.  Not too many software projects
of this scale can claim that !!!

Robert Ramey