Re: [boost] Process discussions

Subject: Re: [boost] Process discussions
From: Joel de Guzman (joel_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-01-31 19:08:08

On 2/1/2011 1:04 AM, Matthias Schabel wrote:
>> I'm with John here. And I can say this: we, the top commiters have no
>> complaints about the tools. We will use whatever tools are available.
>> (at least I speak for Hartmut, John, Volodya and I; but I have a strong
>> feeling that Steven and Daniel agree too).
>
> One should recognize here that there is a strong form of self-selection
> happening; the "top committers" are those individuals who have the
> desire/motivation/incentive to spend a substantial fraction of their
> professional and/or personal time refining their knowledge of the
> details of Boost. For someone who is a Boost consultant (several of
> whom appear at the top of the aforementioned list) this is clearly
> a worthwhile investment and, in fact, having a complex tool chain
> and difficult to master systems is advantageous in that it increases
> the potential demand for consulting work. A simpler and easier-to-
> understand tool chain would presumably lower barriers to entry and
> increase participation from individuals

And I am talking mostly about transitioning to git here. You can't
be seriously saying that git is a simpler and easier-to-understand
tool?

>>   A Good Craftsman Never Blames His Tools
>>
>> And I think what Volodya meant is that more than anyone else, it is
>> us who are in the position to determine if we are using the right tool
>> or whether the tools are making us effective. And... hmmm, I think
>> we are effective ;-)
>
> Speaking from personal experience, I would almost certainly not have
> been able to persevere long enough to see Boost.Units
> through to completion - without Steven's deep knowledge of the Boost
> build system and C++ in general, my ability to define an appropriate
> architecture for dimensional analysis and establish expectations for
> its function would have been stymied by my inability to achieve a
> "professional" implementation. I won't speak for Steven, but I guess that
> it is unlikely that he would have produced that library on his own, either.
> The proliferation of "toy" dimensional analysis libraries (c.f. MPL library
> examples) attests to that.

Fair enough, but I have a feeling that we are not in the same page here.
I am talking mostly about version control and switching to a distributed
VCS like git. I won't go so far as to say that the boost build system is
broken, but I can say that I do want something simpler so we're probably
in agreement there.

Regards,
-- 
Joel de Guzman
http://www.boostpro.com
http://boost-spirit.com