[boost] [netlib] Preparing for 0.9 and 0.8.1 Release, Help Wanted; Readying for Boost Submission

Subject: [boost] [netlib] Preparing for 0.9 and 0.8.1 Release, Help Wanted; Readying for Boost Submission
From: Dean Michael Berris (mikhailberis_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-01-01 12:00:27

Hi Guys!

(Apologies in advance for the cross-post)

I've just pushed the master, 0.8-devel, and 0.9-devel branch onto the
cpp-netlib repository -- please take the time to test all these
branches as I work on getting the documentation up to speed on the
0.9-devel branch preparing for the release and submission for review
on the Boost developers mailing list. I'm also welcoming contributions
in the form of:

* Website help, the current documentation look is OK, but if you have
time to fix up some of the issues like the fonts, adding anchors and
maybe reformatting the API pages so that it's easier indexed, that
would be *sweet*. Also, we need a landing page on
cpp-netlib.github.com which introduces the library, hosts stats, and
maybe has other goodies that are specifically for a website and not
necessarily for documentation.

* Documentation -- please, if you have example use cases that you want
to contribute, now is the time to contribute them. If you have real
world use cases where you're actually using cpp-netlib, now would be a
good time to have your use case highlighted in the documentation.

* More string implementations -- currently I need help with supporting
Qt strings, MS CString, and wide strings in the implementation of the
HTTP Clients. Those who are using wide strings and unicode strings
natively and who have more experience with them (I only ever deal with
the "C" locale) would be most welcome to contribute to getting the
HTTP client to either do conversions or natively support different
string implementations. I can help with the integration part by
introducing the extension points that may not be obvious from the
design (as it is still largely undocumented).

* Examples -- the current set of examples are a little trivial, and if
you have some interesting examples you want to build on (or would like
to implement some of the examples highlighted here:
https://github.com/cpp-netlib/cpp-netlib/issues/labels/Examples) your
contribution would be most welcome.

There are some things that I've pushed out for later releases, as I
would like to concentrate at the moment to making the HTTP
implementations more robust and support a wider range of use-cases.
I'm looking for people with experience with ESMTP 1.0 who would like
to contribute to implementing a simple client implementation that we
can build along the same design as the HTTP client implementation.
There's already a MIME parser/generator library in cpp-netlib thanks
to Marshall Clow (which he presented in BoostCon 2010) also being
developed for inclusion into Boost -- hopefully we can get that baked
into the ESMTP client implementation early on to make it more
immediately useful.

At any rate, please expect a slightly delayed release of 0.9 which
would be the first release which defaults to non-header-only, while
0.8.1 will be the first patch update version for 0.8. Appropriate
changelogs to follow as soon as the releases are ready.

In the meantime, please feel free to test out the code already in
GitHub: http://github.com/cpp-netlib/cpp-netlib/ -- the stabilization
effort for 0.9 and 0.8.1 will happen on this repository.

Feedback would be most appreciated.

Thanks everyone!

-- 
Dean Michael Berris
about.me/deanberris