Re: [boost] Boost summer of formal reviews

Subject: Re: [boost] Boost summer of formal reviews
From: Borislav Stanimirov (b.stanimirov_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-03-11 11:57:22

On 11-Mar-14 14:18, Rob Stewart wrote:
> On March 11, 2014 6:29:15 AM EDT, Borislav Stanimirov <b.stanimirov_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
> Still, if you've got concrete ideas for improving the backlog, speak up.
>

Well I am not familiar with all ideas that have been given and the 
following could have been mentioned before (and even shown to be bad), 
but what about openly accepting donations for Boost and using them to 
actually pay the review managers for their time.

Apart from that, what is the actual risk of adding a bad library to the 
collection?

The following is an idea for a fundamental change in the review process:

* Have a short informal review process based on short reviews from the 
community. More than a spam filter than an actual review process, 
actually. The "reviews" could be something like "Well. It looks OK to me".

* Then have an _automated_ test for eligibility. Does the library 
compile as part of Boost in the most popular compilers and 
configurations? Static and dynamic analyzers can provide code coverage 
info by the library's tests (100% would be a requirement). They will 
check whether it crashes, has memory leaks, and more.

* After a library passes the automated tests, it just becomes a part of 
boost. _BUT!_ It does so in the namespace boost::bleeding_edge. Have a 
disclaimer that bleeding_edge libraries haven't passed a formal review 
yet. Still, even with such a disclaimer, they would be exposed to the 
public, and more people would be encouraged to try them.

* To get out of the bleeding_edge namespace, a library needs to either 
receive a formal review (in the format formal reviews are made now), or 
demonstrate its use in several real-life working projects (independent 
from the author).

How about that?

-- Borislav