Re: Boost.Beast state of play

From: Niall Douglas (s_sourceforge_at_[hidden])
Date: 2020-07-03 13:55:30

On 03/07/2020 11:24, Andrey Semashev via Boost wrote:

> Vinnie's case was "because of WG21 politics". This is not a valid reason
> to compromise Boost quality, I totally agree with Ville on this. I find
> it somewhat disturbing that maintainers of a popular Boost library find
> that acceptable. Boost users experience should have a priority over WG21.

It's funny how Boost.ASIO has suddenly gone from being a very, very
conservative flavour of standalone ASIO, typically trailing by a few
major versions, to where "the stable branch" is code literally written
new in the last few weeks, and with a major rearchitecture to boot.

In the end, each library maintainer gets to make that call for their own
library. But I've always gotten the impression from others here that
major new features should either get a mini review (unnecessary in this
instance due to the WG21 review), or undergo at least a year of testing,
and then ought to be preannounced by least two major Boost releases in
advance before they get merged to master branch.

As an example, I've just announced that Outcome will break all existing
code in two Boost releases time in the Boost changelog. I have been
announcing it on the front page since last Christmas.

Now, little in latest Boost.ASIO will break existing code in obvious
ways. But I have to believe that newly written code is usually more
buggy and/or surprising than older code. It seems unusual to me to
launch that onto users without notification. Again, if that maintainer
doesn't mind the onslaught of bug reports, especially from downstream
distros e.g. RHEL, Debian, StackOverflow, that's on them. I just find it
masochistic, that's all.

Niall