Re: Proposal to make Boost easily citable in academic works with Zenodo

From: Hans Dembinski (hans.dembinski_at_[hidden])
Date: 2024-02-15 11:33:51

> On 15. Feb 2024, at 11:50, Glen Fernandes <glen.fernandes_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Feb 15, 2024 at 5:22 AM Hans Dembinski wrote:
>> It would be great if the admins of https://github.com/boostorg/boost would set this up for the Boost super-project, so that all of Boost becomes citable on the next release.
> 
> Wouldn't it need to be enabled on each individual library repository?
> Or does it handle git submodules?

I think that using the super-project makes most sense for us an organisation, but you are right that it requires a bit of manual work.

Zenodo does not handle git submodules. By default, Zenodo generates the author list from all contributors of the project. Not all Boost devs are contributors to the super-project, so this would not work correctly. I am quite sure that one can override this and provide the list of authors manually, but I would have to look it up again. The author list could be generated by a script from all contributors to all Boost libraries or be restricted to the list of the maintainers.

Apart from the generation of the author list, I don't see an issue with using the super-project, only advantages. If we enabled Zenodo for each Boost project, we would make individual libraries separately citable, but it would not work out of the box, since individual libraries do not make their own releases. The Zenodo trigger acts on a release by default and I don't know whether it works correctly when it is triggered on a tag creation instead.