Re: [boost] Is Boost dead? [Re: Anyone is interested in being review manager of ‘Application’?]

Subject: Re: [boost] Is Boost dead? [Re: Anyone is interested in being review manager of ‘Application’?]
From: Stefan Seefeld (stefan_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-05-08 14:50:15

On 05/08/2014 02:32 PM, Niall Douglas wrote:
> On 8 May 2014 at 13:59, Sohail Somani wrote:
>
>>> For sure, Boost has been slowly dying since 2011 now. I'll be
>>> talking on that exact subject at C++ Now on Saturday week, which I
>>> assume will be as popular as a funeral.
>> Can you say that? I think that the main Boosters were busy moving to 
>> Git. That took a long time and from my perspective, they did a good job 
>> given what they were aiming for.
> There are also wider trends at work. For example, all open source has 
> seen a drop of about 25% in terms of regular contributors or projects 
> regularly active during this past year 2013-2014. I would assume that 
> is macroeconomic in nature.

[...]

While these are all interesting points to consider, I think it would be
useful to focus on the boost "micro economy" a bit. I do believe that
boost has a scalability issue (or actually, issues!). The modularization
effort was (at least in part) meant to deal with that, and the speed of
change provides amply evidence of that problem.
However, the problem is not only about maintainability. It's also about
governance, and about what it takes for a community to feel like one.
A few years ago I had suggested to consider moving to a slightly
different organizational model, like the Apache Software Foundation
(http://www.apache.org/foundation/), to allow projects to be more
autonomous.
The sheer size of Boost is simply too overwhelming for me to appreciate
as a single big entity (both as a user as well as as a contributor),
even though I'm still very much interested into individual components /
projects, and would like to keep contributing to them.

> Some 40 slides and a 20,000 word position white paper should be 
> published as part of the conference proceedings.

I'm very much looking forward to reading that.

Regards,
        Stefan

-- 
      ...ich hab' noch einen Koffer in Berlin...