Re: The Future of Boost - deprecating libraries

From: Peter Dimov (pdimov_at_[hidden])
Date: 2023-05-08 19:28:18

John Maddock wrote:
> "Unmaintained": speaks for itself, the library is important enough to keep
> around, but has no maintainer.  We need a procedure for acquiring new
> maintainers, but traditionally we've recruited from existing authors who are a
> small, and rather busy pool of people.  The alternative is to recruit from
> outside, but we often get enthusiastic, but not very experienced people
> coming forward. Getting them to submit PR's and having an experienced old
> hand check them through is very time consuming and unsatisfactory for both
> parties.

Taking over unmaintained libraries is a problem that, in my opinion, has no
solution. Even an experienced person such as myself has trouble evolving
existing libraries without the deep knowledge of the design decisions that
resulted in their current state. In addition, every new maintainer inevitably
wants (and needs) his work to matter, whereas maintaining a legacy library
is thankless work that leaves no room for creative expression.