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Idea: Boost Software Foundation?
by Dean Michael Berris 25 Nov '09

25 Nov '09

Hi Everyone, I have been watching the passionate debate about how to go about achieving the following: 1. Make Boost less monolithic and more open to contributions 2. Make Boost easier to distribute and support 3. Make Boost better but less complex and more manageable Someone mentioned the "incubator" idea and now that I think about it more I think this model works very well for Boost. Let me try to draw some parallels between the Boost C++ Library and the Apache Software Foundation: 1. As a project, Boost and Apache try to (and I'd like to say both do) deliver high quality open source components under a liberal and commercially friendly license. Boost has many sub-projects that are worth naming like Boost.Build, (Boost.?)Quickbook, BCP, and Boost.Jam (although a little stagnant IIRC). Maybe treating other libraries as sub-projects that have a publicly-accessible and easily "forkable" repository would be a good thing. Git and Github come to mind. 2. As a software distribution, Apache has decentralized the release management of the libraries and software projects under its umbrella. This means sub-projects can depend on specific version releases of other sub-projects instead of making sure that there's only one release that bundles everything together. 3. As an entity, the only difference I see between Apache and Boost are that: * Boost is a volunteer-backed, non-foundation backed entity, while the Apache Software Foundation is legally a non-profit non-stock organization. * Boost does not have resources that "it" owns while ASF employs people in different capacities. * Although the Boost Software License and the Apache Software License are both OSI approved, there seems to be no legal team dedicated to ensuring that the terms of the licenses (and the contributions made by contributors) are "properly" applied. I don't want to instigate an "uprising" here, but I for one would like to see a Boost Software Foundation whose main task would be to further the Boost-licensed projects, and lends its name to signify the high quality and organized peer-reviewed and meritocracy-driven C++ application and library development for the betterment of the C++ language and vendor/implementor/library-author community. And then to see the Boost Software Foundation have a formal means of having projects "built for Boost-inclusion" be drawn into an umbrella project to become "incubated and developed with Boost Quality in mind". If I understand how Apache projects are run, it appears that: * A project manager is assigned/nominated by the community to represent a sub-project in the bigger Apache project. * There are official developers who have commit access to the repository; developers who want to become an official developer of the project signs a contributor agreement which states in no uncertain terms that they agree that their changes committed to the repository are licensed under the Boost Software License. * To become a "committer" to the project, you have to be asked by official developers or nominated by peers based on your contributions in the form of patches or pulls from your "fork". I do not see why this model should not work for Boost granted that some people already take the libraries they maintain as their full-time (or almost full-time) projects (Boost.Thread, Boost.Spirit/Fusion/Phoenix). And because of the decentralized nature of this model, the only "review" that has to happen is whether a sub-project should be incubated, and whether projects in the incubator are deemed "mature" enough to become full-blown Boost.* projects. One other idea about distribution: the biggest hindrance I think is the lack of a "centralized" or "repository-like" location from where released versions of a library can be pulled easily. Haskell has Cabal, Perl has CPAN, Debian has official 'apt' repositories, Ruby has multiple Gem foundries, Python has the Cheese shop (?). Although SVN is centralized by nature, it's not the best means of distributing releases that can be kept in-sync from various locations. Maybe the Boost community might be able to come up with a similar solution and contribute towards building a C++ package-based solution to distributing libraries in a cross-platform and scalable manner? I hope this helps. I personally have no idea how to get a Boost Software Foundation up and running but I do want to participate in that effort in a substantial manner if other people think that would be a good idea and would like to make it happen too. Have a good day everyone, that's my $0.02 worth. -- Dean Michael Berris blog.cplusplus-soup.com | twitter.com/mikhailberis linkedin.com/in/mikhailberis | facebook.com/dean.berris | deanberris.com

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[thread] Bug sprint: #2100 thread fails to compile with -fno-exceptions
by Vicente Botet Escriba 25 Nov '09

25 Nov '09

Ticket description: "The thread component fails to compile with GCC when -fno-exceptions is specified. The attached patch allows the libraries / tests shipped with boost 1.35.0 to compile. There didn't seem to be a better option to make g++ happy than to just #ifndef out the catch(...) block, as it would otherwise complain about the throw in the block." from https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/ticket/2100 Hi, I think that Boost.Thread has not been designed to work without exception. What would be the behavior of the application if we remove just any throw statement? In order to achieve the reporter goal, we should need to add functions returning a return code. IMO this is out of the scope currently. Thus I propose to close the ticket. Anthony, do you agree? Vicente -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/-thread--Bug-sprint%3A--2100-thread-fails-to-compile-… Sent from the Boost - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

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[thrad] #3179 Sleep with local_time
by Vicente Botet Escriba 25 Nov '09

25 Nov '09

Hi, Anthony this ticket have a simple solution. https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/ticket/3179 Nest follows my contents Replying to anonymous: When calling sleep with an absolute time, it sleeps about two hours instead of one second in code similar to the below example. ptime now = second_clock::local_time(); this_thread::sleep( now + second(1) ) After a lot of headache I think that might is due to a missmatch with utc and local time. Please make it possible to sleep until a "local time" (local time zone) and write something about it in the documentations, I haven't found anything special about which type of time should be used. Changed 5 days ago by viboes ¶ The this_thread::sleep prototype is template<typename TimeDuration> void sleep(TimeDuration const& rel_time); The TimeDuration? you can pass as parameter must be one for which system_time+TimeDuration? is defined. You are right that this should be documented. BTW the interface for thread::sleep is void thread::sleep(system_time const& abs_time); Anthony, to be coherent, shouldn't you add the absolute time interface on the namespace this_thread? Waiting fro Boost.Chrono, what about adding void sleep(system_time const& abs_time); void sleep_until(system_time const& abs_time); template <class TimeDuration> void sleep_for(TimeDuration const& rel_time); Best, Vicente -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/-thrad---3179--%09-Sleep-with-local_time-tp26513016p2… Sent from the Boost - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

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[thread] #2361 thread_specific_ptr: nature of the key, complexity and rationale
by Vicente Botet Escriba 25 Nov '09

25 Nov '09

Hi Anthony, As you have made some modifications on the thread-specific_ptr, maybe you could now complete the documentation to answer the questions of the ticket. Best, Vicente -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/-thread---2361--%09-thread_specific_ptr%3A-nature-of-… Sent from the Boost - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

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[thread] #2742 Why the at_thread_exit cleanup function is const?
by Vicente Botet Escriba 25 Nov '09

25 Nov '09

Hi Anthony, thanks for fixing this ticket. Best, Vicente -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/-thread---2742-Why-the-at_thread_exit-cleanup-functio… Sent from the Boost - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

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[thread] #2742 Why the at_thread_exit cleanup function is const?
by vicente.botet 25 Nov '09

25 Nov '09

Hi, Anthony, could you verify the patch and test I have attached to the ticket works for other platforms that cygwin? Thanks, _____________________ Vicente Juan Botet Escribá

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Boost sprint: #3407 boost::call_once not re-entrant (at least in win32)
by Vicente Botet Escriba 25 Nov '09

25 Nov '09

Hi, I have changed the ticket from threads to thread As this works as expected, Anthony could just add on the documentation why reentrant call_once functions are not a good idea. The explanation of Steven could be a good starting point: "I'll also point out that there is no good behavior for a recursive call to call_once. If it calls the function again, then f will be called twice. If it does not, then whatever initialization that call_once is doing may be incomplete. In either case, you have to know whether a call can be recursive and carefully design for it. If it happens accidentally, you're probably toast regardless of how it behaves. In the face of recursive calls it is impossible to maintain the post-condition that the function has run exactly once." After this modification IMO the ticket can be closed. Best, Vicente -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/Boost-sprint%3A--3407-boost%3A%3Acall_once-not-re-ent… Sent from the Boost - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

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[test] New ticket #3664 (SIGCHLD always considered fatal error)
by Johan Nilsson 25 Nov '09

25 Nov '09

New ticket: https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/ticket/3664 Regards / Johan

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Boost Server Downtime Wednesday Morning
by Doug Gregor 25 Nov '09

25 Nov '09

The main Boost server will be down for a short time Wednesday, November 25th (tomorrow!) from 8:00AM Eastern time to 8:30AM Eastern time to replace some memory. This outage will affect most of Boost's services, including the mailing lists, boost.org web server, and Boost Subversion repository (including the sandbox). Sorry for the inconvenience! - Doug

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Re: [boost] Re view Queue Needs Attention
by Tom Brinkman 25 Nov '09

25 Nov '09

>> What's the difference between a non-stable branch as you're suggesting and >> the existing sandbox? The only difference I could see is to establish some >> kind of pre-review process. But that would just move the problem to a >> different spot, no? The "non-stable" branch would be for libraries that have requested reviews or for "approved" libraries that have not yet stabilized. The "sand-box" branch would be for all other libraries that either have not requested reviews or don't plan to. The "review-wizards" John or Ronald or any of the "boost-moderators" could monitor the "non-stable" branch. This would clear the review queue. The only important review would be to establish when a particular library has achieved sufficient maturity to be moved from the "non-stable" branch to the "stable" branch. Once a library is in the "non-stable" branch, the library could be reviewed by anyone anytime. There would be no need for scheduled reviews, like we've had, although they could still be done, if the review manager wants to schedule it. The reviews would be ongoing and done in a blog format, not limited to a ten day block of time. After a library has been in the "non-stable" branch for say six months, the review manager could posts its progress to the mailing list and pose questions to elicit more feedback. The "non-stable" branch would be included as part of the boost installation, but only an optional part, not required. If a library is distributed as "non-stable", it should get lots and lots of attention. Nothing focuses an authors mind more than if they know that their library is going to get some exposure. The libraries in the review queue are not getting the exposure that they need, and are just sitting there for 6-18 months. Very few people are actually aware of these libraries. A better job needs to done to elicit feedback from domain experts. Having only a 10 day review period is way to short. It needs to be like 6-12 months, where the domain experts can contribute at their leisure. This could best be done if a "non-stable" branch is created, which is distributed along with the "stable" branch.

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