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: Niall Douglas (s_sourceforge_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-05-08 16:07:26

On 8 May 2014 at 19:16, JOAQUIN M. LOPEZ MUÑOZ wrote:

> > For example, boost-users has a posting rate nearly a third
> > that of before 2011.
> 
> Regarding this, my personal (weakly substantiated) perception is that
> people are migrating to sexier forums such as stackoverflow to get the
> same help. For instance, 5-6 years back I could get about 1 question a
> week about Boost.MultiIndex on the users list. Now it's like 1 question
> every 3 months here, but 1-2 a week in stackoverflow instead. Blame the
> crude interface a mailing list provides, registration entry barriers
> etc. 

A very solid point. I'll include that in my talk actually.

> As for the decline in the dev list, it looks more serious and there's no
> migration theory that could mitigate it. Also, I feel like the maturity
> level of discussions has fallen :-( 

The dev list is down about 30% 2011 onwards as against before 2011.

Monthly commits to Boost are about 500 per month since 2011 as 
compared to about 1000 per month before 2011.

Monthly active contributors used be over 50 per month before 2011, 
more recently about 35 per month, also about a 30% reduction.

All trends are pointing downwards too, after a large structural shift 
in 2011.

It's the coincidence in all the measures which gets me. Surely they 
all can't be co-correlated. Boost does move in line with all open 
source, so we rise and fall just like the industry in terms of 
activity in commits, messages, contributors etc. But something odd 
seems to have started happening since 2009 when the trend began to 
shift, and there was this sudden drop in 2011 in all measures with a 
slowly increasing decline since.

Niall

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