Re: [Asset Stewardship] About the Beman Project

From: Phil Endecott (spam_from_boost_dev_at_[hidden])
Date: 2024-09-15 18:02:41

Zach Laine wrote:
> 4) The one time I managed to cajole someone [from WG21] into 
> [submitting a library for] a Boost review,
> it was rejected because people didn't see the point of it.  I'm still
> not sure why that was.  It had a point, is quite useful, and is now in
> the standard.

(My edits in [] for clarity, I hope.)

You're referring to JeanHeyd Meneide's out_ptr, right?

My recollection of that episode was that we just didn't have enough reviews.
I think I saw that only about 3 had been written, so I thought I'd 
better try to
write something. JeanHeyd wrote a long reply to my review which finished
by saying something like "Lots of Fortune 500 companies are using this so
it's definitely useful". The problem was, * those Fortune 500 companies
didn't turn up on the list and submit positive reviews *. So you had to
reject it, because a few ignoramuses like me didn't see the point.

As you said, it's a lot of work to prepare a library for review - and 
then it only
gets looked at by five people. In JeanHeyd's case, they were five people
who mostly said no; I worry equally about reviews where libraries with
significant defects get accepted, because the reviewers don't have the
expertise to call out the problems. I'd love to see more reviews submitted
by people in the "upper echelons" of the C++ world, even if they are brief
ones. What are the obstacles that stop people from submitting reviews?

Regards, Phil.

(P.S. Zach, I tried to reply to you off-list to check if I was right 
about this
being out_ptr, but it bounced from gmail's spam filter. Do you have
unusually strong filter settings?)