Re: [boost] Community Maintenance Team and neglected libraries

Subject: Re: [boost] Community Maintenance Team and neglected libraries
From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-05-15 17:35:40

On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 11:36 AM, Daniela Engert <dani_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> Am 22.04.2014 18:29 schrieb Ben Pope:
> > There are quite a few places where the library code is probably fine,
> > but the failure is in the test itself, the fix is often simple and
> > uncontroversial.
> > ...
> > The responses have been frustrating to say the least, we really need a
> > way to move forward on this.
> >
> You're so true with your observation. I'm a bit disappointed too.
>
> I'm sitting on a pile of simple patches to cleanup the existing tests
> such that I don't have to wade through a morass of level-4 msvc compiler
> warnings when running the test suite. This requires both fixes to some
> of the libraries themselves (thereby finding real bugs on the way) and
> fixes to the test code to get the tests compiled in the first place.
> It's those sanitized libraries that I supply to my colleagues for
> production code because it's our policy to be absolutely clean on
> level-4 warnings. Some months ago, I've prepared some of those patches
> (more yet to come) for inclusion into boost mainline, and some of them
> were picked up. The rest of my pull requests seems to be neglected. I
> prefer to refrain from spamming the mailing lists with reminders, but is
> there a better way to get the message through? Dealing with
> quality-of-implementation issues and acting like a janitor might not be
> the most sexy job in the universe, but I'm happy to do it (rather than
> just sitting on the fence) as long as it has an effect, eventually.
>

This is one of the specific examples we have been discussing at C++Now in
Aspen this week.

* You did the right thing when you submitted pull requests.

* Your should get some form of response within a reasonable period of time.
It will take the CMT awhile to put a specific time on "reasonable" but
certainly a month with no response is not reasonable.

* Please post a message on the CMT mailing list, with links to the pull
requests that you haven't heard anything about. It is their responsibility
to decide how to proceed.

* If you have questions about global maintenance changes touching many
libraries, the CMT list is the best place to ask for guidance. The CMT
folks care about maintenance so it is not spamming the list to ask them
maintenance related questions.

HTH,

--Beman