Re: Stewardship Review Request

From: Klemens Morgenstern (klemensdavidmorgenstern_at_[hidden])
Date: 2024-08-09 15:54:47

On Fri, Aug 9, 2024 at 11:43 PM Niall Douglas via Boost
<boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
> On 08/08/2024 23:38, Vinnie Falco via Boost wrote:
> > Recently the Boost Foundation offered the community two choices of
> > organizations for stewardship of Boost's shared resources: itself, and The
> > C++ Alliance. The project needs a decision, in order that its future may be
> > determined.
> >
> > The Formal Review Process is typically called upon to answer the question
> > of whether a library should be accepted into the collection. I have
> > proposed that we use the same process to determine the question of
> > stewardship. It is not perfect, yet it is both familiar and enduring.
> >
> > Although there are two designated review wizards, one is unavailable and
> > the other is traveling. And review wizards have never been called upon to
> > oversee non-library reviews.
> >
> > Therefore, I would like to add a formal review to the calendar for the
> > following days, inclusive:
> >
> >      Monday August 19, to
> >      Wednesday, August 28
>
> Lots of Europeans are on their annual vacation in August and could not
> participate. We generally haven't done peer reviews in August as a
> result. Better to wait until September therefore.
>
> Also, we are missing a bit. Normally there is a proposed Boost library
> for everybody to study and comment upon. Here we also need something for
> everybody to study and comment upon, otherwise the exercise will be useless.
>

I think there's plenty of past interactions to study though.

> We don't have the review managers manage the review of their own
> libraries for good reasons, so we can't do that here either.

Well, being on the board is different from being a director.
And one would assume that a RM that is a member of the Boost Foundation board
would be positively biased towards that foundation - just like an
author is positively biased towards the inclusion of his library.
Thus if the opposing party agrees (i.e. the CppAlliance) I don't see a problem.

>
> Therefore it seems to me that somebody from the options before us needs
> to write a document for the community to study and comment upon. It
> would appear there are three camps: (i) C++ Alliance takes over entirely
> (ii) Boost Foundation retains everything (iii) something in between.
>

I think III is an "ACCEPT with CONDITIONS".

> I would therefore propose that each camp produce a document arguing in
> favour of their option. Those three documents can then be the "library"
> under peer review.

I think there's plenty of communication, contributions & behaviour to review.
I don't think a document would help a lot, as those would just be
policy statements, which are essentially useless.

>
> I appreciate all this is a bit novel. If this approach is seen as the
> right way forwards, I guess we'd then need volunteers to do the work of
> crafting the documents. But let's see if this approach is any good first.

Can you elaborate on what you'd expect to read in those docs?