Re: Boost Asset Stewardship Review from Ruben

From: Ruben Perez (rubenperez038_at_[hidden])
Date: 2024-09-13 19:03:17

On Fri, 13 Sept 2024 at 19:17, Phil Endecott via Boost
<boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
> Ruben Perez wrote:
> > I'd like to echo a point made by others in the mailing list throughout
> > this discussion and also somewhat reflected in The Boost Foundation's
> > proposal, about mailing list friendliness to newcomers. When I first
> > reached out to evaluate the potential usefulness of what would become
> > Boost.MySQL (https://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost//2020/03/248301.php)
> > I received a couple of really discouraging comments, which almost made
> > me abandon the idea. These comments were based on the (somehow
> > understandable) misconception that my library was a wrapper around the
> > official C API. Thanks to other people's support (Richard, Chris,
> > Vinnie and some others, IIRC) I managed to move forward. But it could
> > have not been the case. As a community, we could try to improve
> > instances of this to make things better for newcomers.
>
> I clicked on Ruben's link above, mainly to check if it was a comment from
> me that he was complaining about. It wasn't. But I encourage others
> to look at that email thread. Was it reasonable for Ruben to "almost
> abandon the idea" based on the replies he received? Could the Boost
> review process work effectively if messages such as those in that
> thread were not allowed?
>
>
> Regards, Phil.
>
I've re-read the conversation, and the message I actually remembered
was this one from Andrey:
https://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost//2020/03/248305.php

To be fair, Andrey's confusion was pretty understandable. I explained
myself in a latter message and things went smoother after that:
https://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost//2020/03/248313.php

The point here was that this was my first-ever interaction with the
Boost community (other than just reading the ML). The first
interaction tends to have a bigger impact than successive ones.

I did receive some harsh critics during the review, too, but that's
different - if you've made it to the review, you're prepared to
receive all kinds of feedback. If you've scheduled a review, you're no
longer someone who just arrived to the community (I think there was a
time lapse of 2 years between these two events).

To be clear, I'm not trying to make Andrey or anyone else feel guilty
for this. I'm not suggesting any action to be taken against anyone. I
thought that sharing this experience could help us improve as a
community.

Thanks,
Ruben.