Re: [boost] [test] Looking for co-developer/maintainer

Subject: Re: [boost] [test] Looking for co-developer/maintainer
From: Richard (legalize+jeeves_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-05-19 18:26:56

[Please do not mail me a copy of your followup]

boost_at_[hidden] spake the secret code
<52DFF857.80500_at_[hidden]> thusly:

>On 01/22/2014 12:13 PM, Tim Blechmann wrote:
>
>> sad, but true. though having more than one maintainer for a library
>> would be the best approach for a stable codebase ...

...assuming that the two maintainers share the same vision for the library.

>As far as what I understand, that is what Gennadiy offers.  Richard's 
>offer was more along the line, "I will take over if you get out of my 
>way".  At least that is what I interpreted.

Yes, that is what you interpreted, but you are reading more sinister
things into it than I said -- the "if you get out of my way" part.

I simply offered to take over as maintainer.  As I said in another
reply on this thread, he can refuse the offer and it makes no
difference to me.

>I would not be so eager for 
>a fork, unless there is no other way.

For the record, I am not interested in a fork.  People keep suggesting
this generally or to me specifically and I am not interested in forking.
It doesn't really fix anything in this situation.

>It may be Gennadiy need help, and 
>he ask for help.  Richard did not offer any help in this exchange at least.

Nonsense.  The biggest weakness of Boost.Test has been the documentation
and I basically fixed that.  If you don't consider this to be help,
then hell if I know what it is to be helping.

>As far as the documentation, I find it hard to understand why the 
>various views on the Library that Richards documentation and the 
>original documentation represent could not be integrated somehow to a 
>better total.

If I thought that the problems with the existing documentation could be
substantially corrected by minor changes, then I would have done that.
I struggled with this for many months to try and figure out a way to
submit bug reports that would evolve the existing docs into something
useful.  However, I couldn't find a way to do that without basically
rewriting the whole thing one bug report at a time.

That seemed like a pointless churn through the trac system, so I simply
set about rewriting them, with a call for reviewers here.  For whatever
reason, I never got any email from the maintainer saying he wanted to
be involved in that process and I never saw any posts in the gmane
newsgroups to that effect either, so this rewrite went on for months
with several snapshots and feedback from reviewers before I posted here
for more general review.

So yes, this is a complete replacement and not a tweak here and a
tweak there.

I suppose you could ship both versions of the docs, but to date all
users of the library have said that they prefer the newer version of
the docs.  The maintainer wants to hold the new documentation back
because it doesn't document new features.  I don't see why this is a
reason to hold back the improved documentation for existing features.
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