Re: [boost] [mpl] Abandoning old compilers

Subject: Re: [boost] [mpl] Abandoning old compilers
From: Edward Diener (eldiener_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-02-28 22:37:32

On 2/28/2015 6:48 PM, Steven Watanabe wrote:
> AMDG
>
> On 02/28/2015 04:28 PM, Edward Diener wrote:
>> On 2/28/2015 5:50 PM, Robert Ramey wrote:
>>>
>>> The rest is up to the person responsible for the library.
>>
>> There is no one person responsible for MPL anymore AFAIK. In fact I
>> think the Boost maintenance team also access to change it.
>>
>
> This is exactly why I'm against applying Stephen's
> patches.  The community maintenance team cannot
> substitute for a real maintainer.  It works okay as
> long as the libraries in question are mostly stable,
> but IMHO, we don't have the thorough understanding
> of the libraries needed to make any major changes
> safely.

Then who gets to make a change to a library ? Only a person who is 
wiiling to be the sole maintainer of that library ? Thats seems very 
limiting to me. If there is a group of maintainers to a library, whether 
they are members of the community maintenance team or whether they are 
just those who have been granted write access to that library, and one 
of those maintainers is willing to make changes and follow it through 
after getting a consensus of others involved, why should not that be 
allowed in principle.

MPL may be too big or too difficult to make major changes without a 
thorough knowledge of the library but in the case of Stephen Kelly's 
patches to it to remove outdated compiler support I think that was 
doable without having to understand all the code in the library.