Re: [boost] [peer review queue tardiness] Cleaning out the Boost review queue

Subject: Re: [boost] [peer review queue tardiness] Cleaning out the Boost review queue
From: Niall Douglas (s_sourceforge_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-04-02 08:49:28

On 1 Apr 2015 at 23:37, John Phillips wrote:

>    As a friendly reminder, one thing that leads to libraries stagnating 
> on the queue is that no one volunteers to be the Review Manager for 
> them. So, if you have some experience with Boost, and you are interested 
> in one or more of the libraries on the queue, please contact the author, 
> and Ron and me, and volunteer.
> 
>    The authors pour substantial sweat and cogitation into these 
> libraries, and will be overjoyed by your effort to help them move forward.

I still think that requiring anyone submitting a library for review 
must first act as review manager for another library would be a very 
wise strategy. I don't think it introduces the conflict of interest 
others think, and even if it does, movement is better than 
stagnation.

Both myself and Antony have served as review manager for other 
libraries since submitting our libraries. The present situation is 
frustrating, though I'd imagine for Emil it is even worse seeing as 
he's been waiting a year longer, and yet has been doing all the work 
a library maintainer does except without the recognition or 
visibility of being included into Boost official.

One of the things I was going to recommend at Robert's Boost 2.0 talk 
at C++ Now was that if a Boost ready library does not see a review 
after three years, and during that time it has remained maintained to 
the same quality as a Boost library, it should enter Boost 
regardless. Whilst peer review is important, it is impractical for 
very niche libraries, and where the quality of implementation, 
documentation, testing, maintainance and the maintainer are all up to 
Boost standards repeatedly demonstrated over a three year period then 
peer review is in my opinion dispensible. Similarly, if an existing 
library is not substantially maintained for three years, especially 
if its maintainer has vanished, it gets dropped from Boost 
regardless.

Obviously notification of automatic addition and automatic removals 
would form part of the release notes for two preceding major 
releases.

Niall

-- 
ned Productions Limited Consulting
http://www.nedproductions.biz/ 
http://ie.linkedin.com/in/nialldouglas/