[boost] RFC: Community maintained libraries

Subject: [boost] RFC: Community maintained libraries
From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2013-12-04 09:47:52

Boost libraries have always been maintained by an individual maintainer, or
perhaps a small number of individuals. That works very well most of the
time, and there is no need to change that approach for libraries that
continue to have active maintainers.

Where we have a problem is libraries that don't have active maintainers.
Someone else has to step in from time-to-time to apply patches and perform
other routine maintenance. That was easy to do for our svn repo because
write permissions were global.

GitHub gives us some additional tools; write permissions are given at the
Team level, and a team can have permissions across multiple specific
repositories.

Strawman Proposal
-------------------------

For Boost libraries where there is no library maintainer available, turn
maintenance over to a "Community" team. Initially the team members would be
volunteers who are already known as experienced maintainers or patch
submitters. New volunteers for team membership would establish themselves
by submitting patches and pull requests. At least to get things started,
the release managers could OK requests for team membership.

We might seed the list of libraries being community maintained by
contacting some current maintainers who have not been active for years. If
we can't even contact the maintainer, that's an indication the library is a
candidate for community maintenance. Patch submitters who haven't gotten
any action can request a library be added to community maintenance. At
least to get things started, the release managers could OK requests for
community maintenance.

Comments?

--Beman