Re: [boost] RFC: Community maintained libraries

Subject: Re: [boost] RFC: Community maintained libraries
From: Rob Stewart (robertstewart_at_[hidden])
Date: 2013-12-06 05:34:09

On Dec 5, 2013, at 4:39 PM, Steven Watanabe <watanabesj_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> On 12/05/2013 12:59 PM, Alexander Lamaison wrote:
>> Andrey Semashev <andrey.semashev_at_[hidden]> writes:
>> 
>>> I think Alexander is making a good point that the membership in the Community  group should represent the right to apply changes and not an obligation to do active maintenance of every library in Boost. Such an obligation is 
>>> unrealistic to fulfill, indeed. But for one, I'd like to be able to make  changes to the libraries I don't develop or maintain.
>>> 
>>> There is a slippery edge in this idea though. While I'd welcome people making fixes and relatively small improvements to the libraries I maintain, I'd feel unease if design decisions were made without my consent.
>> 
>> I anticipate this only happening in two rare situations, one extremely rare.  The more common case would be where a maintainer is uncontactable or unable to devote enough time to make the changes.
[snip]
>> The second, rare case would be where, after exhaustive debate on the list, the community
>> is overwhelmingly in favour of a direction for the library but the maintainer simply refuses.  It's hard to see any reason why the maintainer should be able to veto the whole community for all time.
> 
> I don't see any point in discussing this.  I don't
> expect this situation to come up, ever.  Not to mention that in such a situation, it's quite possible that the maintainer is right anyway, since he presumably knows the library better than anyone else.

More importantly, if the community imposes its will on the maintainer, how likely is that maintainer to support the library thereafter?

A more likely course is for those inclined toward a major change unacceptable to the maintainer, is to create and submit a new library. If the library is accepted, and the old falls out of favor, then the old will become a candidate for pruning at some point.

___
Rob
(Sent from my portable computation engine)