Re: [boost] Boost Incubator Status Report

Subject: Re: [boost] Boost Incubator Status Report
From: Edward Diener (eldiener_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-11-07 17:35:02

On 11/7/2014 11:23 AM, Robert Ramey wrote:
> Vladimir Prus-3 wrote
>> it's just we see that formal reviews are not as well-attended as before,
>> and one way to improve
>> might be to make participation easier.
>
> I've been concerned about the low attendance in the formal review process
> for years. (Is Boost Broken? BoostCon 2010?).  The motivation behind the
> design of the incubator is to "make participation easier" by decoupling the
> preparation of the review from a specific 1-2 week time frame.  It was also
> specifically designed to not alter the actual Boot Review process.  So far,
> it has only garnered one "pre-review" so one could say it's a failure.  But
> I'm not done yet.  I'm very stubborn - I made 27 versions of the
> serialization library (with one formal review which rejected it.  I'm not
> done yet here either.  There wiil be incremental changes in the Boost
> Library Incubator implementation to encourage more reviews.

Other than lengthening the formal review process to encourage more 
people to participate I do not see any means to get people more 
interested in reviewing Boost libraries. As far as the incubator is 
concerned I feel it is a good idea but nobody is using it to comment on 
libraries. As far as Boost reviews it appears that most programmers are 
afraid to even make comments about a potential library in which they may 
be interested. Maybe the specter of C++ experts scares them away. Maybe 
they feel that they might look foolish if they make a comment which is 
based on just a partial understanding of the library involved. I do not 
think the problem is with the programmers defending their library up for 
review since nearly all of them are openly willing to explain any area 
of their library which a reviewer may not understand or approve.

Finally there is a decided problem with the lack of people willing to be 
review managers for a library. I think it would be a good idea to 
establish a pool of people, with their e-mail addresses, willing to be 
review managers and then when a library is on the review queue one of 
the review managers would send out e-mail to all people in the pool 
asking each one if he would be willing to be the review manager for a 
particular library. If no one at a given time in the pool will agree, 
then after some pre-established time period the process repeats itself. 
Of course if almost no one is willing to be part of the pool, then we 
won't have any formal reviews.