Re: [boost] [test] boost.test owner unresponsive to persistent problems for multiple years

Subject: Re: [boost] [test] boost.test owner unresponsive to persistent problems for multiple years
From: Jürgen Hunold (jhunold_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-01-05 14:54:20

Hi!

Am Montag, 5. Januar 2015, 19:07:51 schrieb Richard:
> [Please do not mail me a copy of your followup]

> You have said before that you are pressed for time to work on this
> library and move things forward in a timely manner.  Simple fixes that
> take more than 5 years to appear in a release speak volumes to this.

The main  issue seems to be the major refactorings in the develop branch. It 
is easy to blame the tool, but the new functionality should have been develop 
in a separate feature branch. This is what several other projects do with 
success. And the monolitic svn repository made this difficult at least.
 "develop" should really be treated like "maintenance" in my opinion. And 
regularly be merged to master.

> If you don't have time to maintain this library in a realistic manner,
> then you should hand it over to someone else.  Even with collaboration,
> you're saying it will takes weeks and months to get fixes released that
> have been prepared over 5 years ago.

I think Gennadiy is refering to the whole docs and _refactorings_ release 
which will of course include the bug fixes. And this unfortunately takes time.

> That just plain sucks.  There's no way to sugar coat it.

As both fixes and features are intertwined, the only other solution would be to 
get a list of only the "fixes" and cherry-pick them to the release branch as 
quick as possible. Just prepare a set of pull request for master doing this.
One thing git is good for and which really sucks with svn.

In my eyes the main lesson this teaches us is to always to massive 
refactorings and features on dedicated branches with git.

Testing those is a different matter, of course...

Yours,

Jürgen
-- 
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