Re: [boost] A bike shed (any colour will do) on greener grass...

Subject: Re: [boost] A bike shed (any colour will do) on greener grass...
From: Marshall Clow (mclow.lists_at_[hidden])
Date: 2013-10-31 13:40:11

On Oct 31, 2013, at 9:20 AM, Niall Douglas <s_sourceforge_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> On 31 Oct 2013 at 2:08, Ahmed Charles wrote:
> 
>> I'm personally on the fence about this policy. I see some library
>> authors that are responsive and reasonable with their library and I
>> wouldn't want to disenfranchise them one bit. But I also see that it can
>> create an 'old guard' sort of situation that benefits no one. With power
>> should come responsibility and there should be a mechanism that ensures
>> that libraries that stagnate are given new maintainers. I understand
>> that there is a shortage of people signing up to maintain libraries, but
>> I think at least part of that is due to the impression that libraries
>> are only ever 'pried from the hands of their dead maintainers'. 
> 
> I am personally strongly in favour of libraries getting deprecated 
> and removed from releases if they are not maintained - let's say no 
> bug fixes by its maintainer in two major release cycles adds them to 
> the list of soon to be deprecated libraries, and no bug fixes by its 
> maintainer in three major release cycles has them removed from Boost 
> central and put into an attic. That encourages new maintainers to 
> step forwards, and old maintainers to give up their control if they 
> can't keep up due to life commitments.
> 
> It would require some political bravery from the SC though, as users 
> will get upset. I would also personally count lack of adding direct 
> C++11 support as equal to lack of bug fixing, but I appreciate that 
> will be controversial (what is C++11 support anyway???) :)

A good question.
For example, what does it mean to add C++11 support to Boost.Array?

#if __cplusplus >= 201103L
#warning "You should really think about using std::array instead of boost::array."
#endif

:-) :-)

-- Marshall

Marshall Clow     Idio Software   <mailto:mclow.lists_at_[hidden]>

A.D. 1517: Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the church door and is promptly moderated down to (-1, Flamebait).
        -- Yu Suzuki