Re: [boost] RFC: Community maintained libraries

Subject: Re: [boost] RFC: Community maintained libraries
From: Andrey Semashev (andrey.semashev_at_[hidden])
Date: 2013-12-04 13:08:48

On Wednesday 04 December 2013 09:47:52 Beman Dawes wrote:
> 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?

I like the idea. It allows to keep the unmaintained libraries in good shape.

I'd like to be in the Community team. I'm not sure how much time I would be 
able to devote to accepting patches since I have a few libraries to maintain. 
But I'd like to be able to commit patches to the libraries I'm interested in 
(like Boost.DateTime, for example).