Re: Boost 1.87.0 Release Report

From: Vinnie Falco (vinnie.falco_at_[hidden])
Date: 2024-12-17 14:31:11

On Tue, Dec 17, 2024 at 6:06 AM John Maddock via Boost <
boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> This is interesting... somewhat, but I'm not sure how useful it is at
> present, or how well it reflects the overall "health" of your favorite
> library.
>

Thanks for the feedback. The release report is aimed at contributors, not
end users. This is a little something to help recognition of effort. For
end users we put this information directly on the website itself. For
example, Boost.Math shows everyone who contributed to the last release and
they are sorted descending by the number of commits:
https://www.boost.io/library/1.87.0/math/

The "health" of libraries should be reflected on the website since that
will affect the new or returning user experience. I'm not sure how we want
to reflect it so some experimentation is probably needed. The release
report is pretty rough since it is the first version and we will continue
to iterate on it.

Something that might be useful to see, would be two lists: one of
> libraries with no commits, and one with no issues fixed.  That might
> help focus minds on which libraries need community assistance, and which
> should quite frankly be deprecated.  I notice that some of the libraries
> listed only have "infrastructure" commits which would also count as "no
> real maintenance".
>

There are a couple of ways to go about this. One is that we can do some
elaborate analysis of the repositories. On the other hand, there are only a
finite number of repos. We could just manually mark the ones we believe
should be "deprecated." I brought up the idea of deprecating libraries and
there was a lot of opposition. So deprecation per-se might not be the right
path. Instead we could just mark the libraries on the site and provide some
sorting options. I'm happy to hear ideas on what to do.

> BTW if this is intended for end users, then I think something closer to
> a "press release" - with all the work entailed in writing that - would
> be much more appropriate.
>

It is really just for contributors. They deserve something special. There's
a place for the FSC to communicate on every release. I'm hoping that as we
iterate on this it becomes more valuable and useful for bringing the
volunteers together, building a sense of pride and accomplishment, and
general good feels.

Thanks