Re: Boost Asset Stewardship Review from Ruben

From: Andrey Semashev (andrey.semashev_at_[hidden])
Date: 2024-09-13 20:25:33

On 9/13/24 14:41, Ruben Perez via Boost 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.

My comments in that discussion were not particularly positive, so I'm
guessing you're referring to me. If so, I'm truly sorry that my comments
made that effect on you and almost costed us a great new library.
Perhaps, I should have chosen a different tone of my messages.

However, I think it is fair to ask a new author to explain why the
proposed library is useful, and it is the author's task to correct
possible misconceptions that may become apparent among the community
during the discussion. I think, the community members should be able to
express their thoughts on the library, even if those thoughts are not
positive. Yes, unfortunately, this may put extra pressure on the author
of the proposal, but I think even the negative feedback is much more
useful than no feedback at all. Because you can take negative feedback
and convert it to improvements to your library, but you can't do that
with silence.

Going back to that particular discussion, I still remain of the same
opinion that I expressed then. Specifically, that I see little value in
simple C++ wrapper libraries on top of a C library. There may be
exceptions, mostly when the C++ wrapper offers substantially more than a
simple translation of the underlying C interface, but my general view
remains what I said. Of course, when I wrote my comments in that
discussion I was incorrectly assuming that the proposed Boost.MySQL was
such a wrapper library. I probably should have investigated deeper
before commenting.