Re: [boost] Community Maintainence Team - a Modest proposal

Subject: Re: [boost] Community Maintainence Team - a Modest proposal
From: Niall Douglas (s_sourceforge_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-05-13 11:58:29

On 12 May 2015 at 8:14, Robert Ramey wrote:

> Today at 12:45 in Bethe is the operations meeting of the Boost Community
> Library Maintainence team.  In advance of that meeting I'd like to render my
> proposal on this list so I have it written down.
> [snip]
> This moves the responsibility for library maintainence to those most willing
> and able to undertake it.  The role of the CMT would be to promote, recruit,
> certify, and monitor library maintainence.  The CMT would have the authority
> to move the responsability from maintainer to another.  The current practice
> of having a single person/entity responsible for maintainence of a library
> would continue unchanged.

Myself and Robert spent much time in the bar last night discussing 
this. It was a very valuable discussion I think.

I think it's a great idea. My only addition is that I think (and I 
believe Robert agrees) that we need to become far more aggressive at 
marking libraries as unmaintained. If the maintainer doesn't reply to 
email for over a year nor commits any new code, I think their name 
needs to be removed as maintainer and the CMT adds that library to 
the unmaintained list. Right now a maintainer has to explicitly 
notify Boost they are abandoning a library, otherwise their name 
remains in some cases for five years or more.

By the most aggressive measurements, about 60 Boost libraries are 
unmaintained or undermaintained (about half of the total). No one is 
proposing that anything is done about undermaintained libraries. If a 
maintainer makes a single commit in a year, or replies to a single 
email, they remain as maintainer.

Niall

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