[boost] [endian] Post-mini-review status: endian ready to merge to master

Subject: [boost] [endian] Post-mini-review status: endian ready to merge to master
From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-02-18 11:32:36

Here is a post-mini-review status report  to support a pull request to
merge endian into the boost super-project master branch as a
submodule. (It has been a submodule of the super-project develop
branch for months.)

The mini-review ran from January 23rd through February 1st. There were
over 50 messages posted in the main review thread ("[Review]
Boost.Endian mini-review").

The key question Joel Falcou, the review manger, asked was:

     Is the library ready to be added to Boost releases?

All seven responses to the question were "Yes" votes (Peter Dimov,
Nevin Liber, Philip Bennefall, Jason Newton, Jeremy Maitin-Shepard,
Cliff Green, Bjorn Reese), and none of these votes were conditional.

Other things that came out of the mini-review discussion:

* Major concern: The default alignment needs to revert to unaligned.
There should be no problem completing this before the final 1.58.0
release, and probably before the beta, but I need to carve out a quiet
couple of hours to review the discussions before actually doing the
revert.

* Major concern: Floating point support needs an additional test
program tailored to the characteristics of floating point numbers. A
warning needs to be added to the docs alerting users that FP support
is much less mature than integer support. The plan is to create the
new test program in the next few days, and ask on the list for
contributions of test cases from FP experts.

* Requests for new features: A couple of simple to analyze and
implement features have already been added. Other possible new
features were added to a "Future directions" section of the docs so
they won't be forgotten.

* Technical fixes and suggestions. Most of these have already been applied.

* Documentation fixes and suggestions. Most of these have already been
applied, with three or four docs change emails still to be processed.

Today is the cut off for 1.58.0 new libraries, so I'm planning to
submit pull requests to merge endian submodule support from the boost
super-project's develop branch into its master branch. (endian
submodule support has been in the boost super-project's develop branch
for months.)

Thanks to all of those who contributed to the mini-review!

--Beman