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: Niall Douglas (s_sourceforge_at_[hidden])
Date: 2013-10-31 14:21:11

On 31 Oct 2013 at 19:00, Stephen Kelly wrote:

> > I am personally strongly in favour of libraries getting deprecated 
> > and removed from releases if they are not maintained - let's say no 
> [snip]
> With 68 libraries in a circular-dependent mesh, how do you expect that
> would work?

Judging from that dependency graph you posted a while ago, you're 
right there is a small core of libraries where deprecation due to 
lack of maintenance can't work. It's a reasonable bet however that 
none of those core libraries has ever seen two major releases pass 
without a bug fix, so therefore those are moot. If, however, there IS 
a core library highly used by other libraries which has seen open 
bugs with no fixes for more than two major releases, I would hope 
some serious alarm bells start ringing - either way, right now we 
don't automate such a process, so if it were happening would we even 
know?

I suspect that core library list is far smaller than 68, but you're 
the expert here. Do you know how tightly integrated those 68 
libraries are e.g. how many of them pull in a dependency only to 
never use it or use it very lightly? How many pull in dependencies 
which can now be replaced with C++11 standard libraries instead? That 
sort of thing.

(P.S.: I don't expect you to know the precise answer to this, but I'm 
very sure you know much more than I do).

Niall

-- 
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Work Portfolio: http://careers.stackoverflow.com/nialldouglas/