Re: [text] [review] Text formal review result

From: Ville Voutilainen (ville.voutilainen_at_[hidden])
Date: 2020-06-27 20:18:38

On Sat, 27 Jun 2020 at 23:06, Andrey Semashev via Boost
<boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
> On 2020-06-27 20:55, Ville Voutilainen via Boost wrote:
> > On Sat, 27 Jun 2020 at 18:48, Edward Diener via Boost
> > <boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> >> You have raised a bunch of hackles here. The LEWG, along with all other
> >> C++ standard committees, seems to me so much less open to debate than
> >> Boost is that it is hard to know what to say about your assertion that
> >> "This list is not very welcoming". Nor can anything ever be found out
> >> from the C++ standards committee why such and such was accepted or
> >> rejected, or what the arguments were about after the fact.
> >
> > Have you tried asking a committee member, or just asking on std-discussion?
>
> Asking a committee member requires personal interaction, and you have to
> know who to ask in the first place. Personal interaction is
> understandably a strong barrier for some.

Well, for future reference, I am happy to entertain reasonable
requests for "why was this thing accepted/rejected,
can you outline the discussion and the arguments?".

> Asking on std-discussion or std-proposals is a possibility. I have tried
> that a few times, with mixed success. I suspect, a lot of proposal
> authors don't actively monitor these lists for questions or comments
> regarding proposals beyond the initial discussion phase, and committee
> members are either too busy, or not involved in the proposal, or don't
> reply for any other reason.

The signal/noise ratio of those discussion forums is unfortunately not
very good.

> As someone who haven't attended the committee meetings personally, but
> prepared a proposal with a representative, I can say that even obtaining
> the results of discussion of your own proposal is difficult.

That's unfortunate; you should be able to get that information from
the representative.
I can slap^Whelpfully guide them what their job as proposal champions
is, if you wish.

> It is a very reasonable request to have a public searchable access to
> the result of review and discussion of a given proposal, if only to be
> able to learn from it or point to when another person comes up with a
> similar proposal. It may be difficult to implement, but the demand is there.

It's not a question of implementation difficulty, it's more a question
of how visible the comments
made in a discussion are. There's a difference in discussing technical
matters with an open
crowd, and with a less open crowd.

> > It also seems to me that there tends to be a multitude of meeting trip reports
> > that cover why such and such was accepted or rejected.
>
> Trip reports do not provide that information beyond the general results
> of the most prominent proposals. They do not contain the discussion
> results on every proposal. Besides, a trip report is a perspective of a
> single person, who may have not even participated in the proposal you're
> interested in. You'd have to search multiple personal blogs to find such
> reports, among other posts, from multiple persons, with no certainty
> you'll find the information you need in the first place.

Fair enough. I merely wonder whether "nor can anything be found" is an
accurate/correct statement
to make. I am all in favor of improving the communication of feedback
to proposal authors. To the
general public, I find it non-obvious that there should necessarily be
more openness about it.

P.S. I'm a Free Software developer, I contribute to GCC and libstdc++
on a fairly regular basis.
The virtues of open collaboration are not foreign to me. They aren't
necessarily virtues in
all situations.