[boost] Your Boost Needs You!

Subject: [boost] Your Boost Needs You!
From: John Maddock (boost.regex_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-12-30 07:07:48

There's been a lot of discussion lately about improving participation in 
Boost, this is a call to arms for a *small* initial experiment which I hope 
will grow into something bigger, perhaps after some tweaking to the initial 
experiment.  The aim is to merge the ideas put forward for a Boost Guild, 
with mine for a roving hit squad to tackle neglected libraries.  It goes 
like this:

* Someone, lets call him a manager/mentor/maintainer puts forward a library 
that has a large number of open tickets against it and which maybe hasn't 
seen maintenance in some time.
* The manager creates a copy of that library in the sandbox for folks to 
work on.
* The volunteers either submit patches or - preferably - commit patches 
direct to the sandbox copy.  Work continues for a month or two until 
everyone agrees that they have a release ready update (tested locally by the 
volunteers).
* The manager reviews the changes and either: merges the changes to Trunk, 
or files a clear list of things to do to make the update acceptable.
* If the Trunk tests don't pass (and the fix isn't obvious/trivial) the 
manager throws the problem back to the volunteers, otherwise merges to 
Release.

The aim is to:

* Minimize the "manager/maintainer/mentor" bottleneck by having one review 
of a whole set of changes to one library, rather than having to deal with 
lots of little patches from all the over the place.
* Maximize the chances that the volunteers achieve something meaningful in a 
defined set of time, by defining clear goals from the outset, and selecting 
a manageable target from the many folks could choose - currently we suffer 
from the "too much to choose from or do, so why do anything" dilemma.
* The manager undertakes the responsibility for stewarding the update 
through to the release branch - frankly this is only possible by the mentor 
dealing with one library at a time, otherwise the "many small patches" 
problem quickly becomes overwhelming.
* Give recognition to volunteers for their efforts, first by providing the 
"I did that" feeling from working towards a specific target, second by 
adding acknowledgements or in the case of partial (or complete!) rewrites, 
co-authorship to the docs.

Like I said the aim is to start small with an experiment (low risk, low 
expectations) to see how it goes... then refine the process... and hope we 
can grow it into something larger over time.

For this I'm prepared to act as the mentor/manager for an update to the pool 
library (though I'm certainly open to other suggestions, and if someone else 
would like to take on the manager/mentor role then by all means fell free! 
:-) ).  I chose this library because it's seen essentially no maintenance 
(and certainly no maintainer) since it was written, and because on the face 
of it, it looks to be a manageable task for folks to take on.

So... let me know if you're interested, and if there's enough people I'll 
define the goals and get things started,

Regards, John.