- Boost - lists.boost.org

A Follow Up to My Original Note Re The Future of Boost
by Kristen Shaker 06 Aug '24

06 Aug '24

Hello Everyone, Thank you for patiently waiting while we had the opportunity to discuss things. Many of you have not heard my name before - this is largely because as a board, we do much of the non - dev work behind the scenes, such as administrative tasks like paying bills. However, I do want to take this opportunity to introduce myself quickly and to emphasize that - should anyone wish to reach out to me directly - I am happy to correspond via phone or email. My name is Kristen - I spent many years at Google on the C++ Core Libraries Team. I am heavily involved as an organizer in CppCon and C++Now. If anyone is curious about what I did at Google, I did give a talk <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=torqlZnu9Ag> on automated refactoring and Clang Tidies that you can find on Youtube. My duties as Board Chair involve sending out meeting agendas, taking meeting notes, and collating meeting minutes. It is not our role to lead, but rather to support the Boost project. The leadership and direction of the Boost project has and should remain with the Boost Developers. The original Boost Steering Committee home page articulates its purpose as follows: “In the Boost community decisions have always been made by consensus and individual members have shown leadership by stepping forward to do what they felt needed to be done. Boost has not suffered from a lack of leadership or volunteer participation. It is not the role of the Steering Committee to inhibit this kind of spontaneous leadership and action, which has served Boost and the wider C++ community so well. On the contrary, it is the role of the Steering Committee to facilitate community-based leadership and decision making. The role of the Committee is to be able to commit the organization to specific action either where funds are required or where consensus cannot be reached, but a decision must be made.” We generally encourage any Boost Developer who would like to be more involved in administrated or organizational decisions to consider joining the board. We have multiple open board seats. Several Boost Developers are on the board and additional developers have been invited in the past - however they have decided against joining due to their distaste for the type of administrative work we do. We would love to hear more from you. Please reach out. You can reach all of us at once via boostfoundationdirectors(a)boost.org. Additionally, if you’d like to attend one of our board meetings, we regularly host guests. The C++ Alliance and the Boost Board of Directors have had their disagreements. Recently, it has become apparent - in particular via their attempt to purchase the boost.org domain name and the proposed new Boost Logo - that The Alliance would like to exert a greater sense of ownership over Boost Library assets. The desired control over assets is what I was referring to in my original note regarding their attempt to take ownership over the Libraries. While the C++ Alliance is a non profit organization, it is wholly funded and effectively controlled by one individual - Mr. Falco. The Board of Directors has a stewardship responsibility to Boost and we are wary of a single individual exerting such a level of control over the Boost Libraries. The Board has existed for many years and will continue to exist - as new members are regularly on boarded as tenured ones retire. Given the structure of the Board and the nature of the volunteer work, we believe ourselves to be the more permanent entity. Many have mentioned a desire for cool headed coordination between the two organizations. I also believed this to be the most advantageous outcome, so I reached out to Mr. Falco to establish a direct line of communication. Even now I would characterize our personal relationship as quite positive. Due to some pre-existing personality clashes, it is now our understanding that Mr. Falco believes collaboration to be an impossibility. Therefore, a large part of Mr. Falco’s motivation to acquire the domain name stemmed from a desire to cut the Board of Directors out of all future decision making processes. Given that I believed we had made great progress toward greater collaboration, I was personally gutted by this turn of events. Accordingly, we did not see a well lit path forward regarding coordination between the Boost Board and the C++ Alliance. This decision was in no way meant to minimize the great contributions The Alliance has made to the Boost Libraries. We do not want to discourage Alliance members from contributing to Boost. This is fundamentally a question about the stewardship of the Boost Library Assets. As mentioned above, the Boost Board of Directors exists largely to facilitate community based decision making. Accordingly, we feel the most appropriate thing to do at this juncture would be to let the developers make a decision on how they would like to proceed regarding what level of ownership the C++ Alliance should have on Boost Library assets. Here are what we believe to be the available options. 1. The C++ Alliance assumes control of the Boost assets, including the boost.org domain name. The Boost Foundation becomes uninvolved in any decisions related to the Boost Libraries. 2. The Boost Foundation continues to be the stewards of the boost.org domain name and related assets. New assets that are meant to be associated with the Boost Libraries are transferred to the Boost Foundation. In any matters related to the Boost Libraries, the Board will abide by any decisions made by the developers but will no longer vote themselves on issues as they relate to the Boost Libraries unless there truly is no clear consensus or path forward. There was some discussion about the assets being held in a third party non profit controlled by a subset of the Boost Developers. However, given that there are already many Boost Developers on the Boost Foundation Board of Directors, we don’t see this as a meaningful deviation from the status quo. Also as one final note, many on the mailing list expressed a distaste for the political nature of this disagreement. Of course, being involved in political spats is not why you joined Boost! We completely understand this. Believe me when I say we don’t like dealing with political disagreements either - no one does. They’re draining and they can distract from an organization’s larger mission. However, sometimes, they are truly unavoidable. We’re articulating our thought process here, not to annoy you, but so every Boost Developer has a say in how things turn out. Warm Regards, The Boost Board of Directors Also here are some answers to some of the more specific questions. There were a lot of them and I believe some were answered in the preceding paragraph. Sincerest apologies if I missed a question or two. Beman Dawes did pass away in 2020. The Boost Foundation did take action when the domain expired. In fact, Michael Caisse spent many hours on the phone with support figuring out how to pay for the bill so the website would be accessible. Additionally, he invested significant time in procuring the death certificate so we could own the domain. Progress was being made, albeit slowly.

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[release] Reminder: Master Branch closes for all changes this WEDNESDAY August 7th
by Marshall Clow 05 Aug '24

05 Aug '24

For the 1.86.0 release. The calendar is here: https://www.boost.org/development/index.html — Marshall P.S. If you have change notes, don’t forget to add them to the website.

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Re: [boost] A Follow Up to My Original Note Re The Future of, Boost
by John Phillips 03 Aug '24

03 Aug '24

On Thur, Aug 1, 2024 at 6:37?AM Vinnie Falco via Boost < boost(a)lists.boost.org> wrote: On Wed, Jul 31, 2024 at 1:52?PM Kristen Shaker via Boost < boost(a)lists.boost.org> wrote: > ...let the developers make a decision on how they would like to proceed Thank you, and this is very much in the Boost tradition. While the Boost Software License is likely to be the project's most impactful contribution, the Formal Review Process is a close second. Therefore, I propose that the question of custodianship be decided by a formal review. It is becoming more and more difficult to find suitable review managers who are not associated with the C++ Alliance (a self-inflicted wound, I suppose) but I nominate these as candidates: Ion Gaztanaga John Maddock Thanks ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ I understand the desire to use something like the review process for this, but I think we need to be cautious about the differences between a software review and what we need in this case. Not that there is no way to do something similar to a review, but just to make sure we understand what the review process is good at and not good at. The intent of the review process is to let interested developers share ideas and expertise to find the best technical solution. The proposed library is the focus of the discussion but in some cases the conversation can range far from the proposal. The allowed outcomes include fully accepting the proposal, provisional acceptance with stipulations, or rejecting the proposal with constructive commentary about how it could be improved to have a more positive reception. All the participants on this list know this, but consider how the review process compares to what is needed in this conversation. We're trying to solve organizational and legal issues, instead of implementation and documentation issues. We want to decide what path would best allow us to proceed with our core tasks of producing high quality, real world usable libraries for inclusion in a broad spectrum of software uses, leading to refinement of implementation and interface so we can have a solid proposal for inclusion into the C++ standard. What organization would give the work we do the needed visibility so developers and companies around the world want to try the Boost libraries? What leadership would give our developers sufficient insight into the needs of C++ developers at large required to provide for those needs? What what resources will allow us to solve the technical and legal issues in our structure and infrastructure that we need to continue to mature and grow effectively? These aren't questions I personally have the technical and organizational expertise to judge well. Nor are they questions that someone could provide a sample implementation for during a review to illustrate a potential pitfall. They are however questions where some members have a strong personal stake and contention could cause lasting and damaging rifts between the volunteers that are the heart and soul of Boost. It is also true that reviews tend to have just the three outcomes listed above, while this process could come to conclusions no one has even thought of to mention, yet. I also think that to be useful it will need extensive involvement from as many Boost participants as possible. You can have a good technical review of a library that is dominated by half a dozen experts in the problem and techniques to address it. This review will need input from half or more of the Boost community to produce the broad buy in that such organizational decisions should get. This is again not to say it can't be done. I am only trying to make sure that we understand the possible ways a review of this sort will be far different from the normal reviews we perform. John Phillips Review Wizard

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Notice of Intent To Redirect boost.org to boost.io
by Vinnie Falco 02 Aug '24

02 Aug '24

All: A consensus to launch the new Boost website was reached by both the community and the Boost Foundation. Since then, the Foundation has: * Ignored the consensus decision reached in April [1] * Prevented the C++ Alliance's attempt to secure the boost.org domain [2] * Launched the competing "Beman Project" [3] * Voted to "cut ties with the Alliance" [4] * Avoided important questions asked on the mailing list, for over a month As it is clear now that Foundation control of the boost.org domain may be harmful to Boost, the existing website will be redirected to the new website. Absent objection, this pull request to redirect boost.org to boost.io will be merged on August 5, 2024: https://github.com/boostorg/website/pull/861 Thanks [1] https://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost/2024/04/256602.php [2] https://cppalliance.org/pdf/Domain-Name-Purchase-Agreement.pdf [3] https://www.bemanproject.org/ [4] https://cppalliance.org/pdf/Boost-Foundation-Minutes.pdf

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Re: [boost] A Follow Up to My Original Note Re The Future of Boost
by Adam C Getchell 01 Aug '24

01 Aug '24

> On Aug 1, 2024, at 3:31 PM, boost-request(a)lists.boost.org wrote: >> >> Here are what we believe to be the available options. >> >> 1. >> >> The C++ Alliance assumes control of the Boost assets, including the >> boost.org domain name. The Boost Foundation becomes uninvolved in any >> decisions related to the Boost Libraries. +1. My perspective is that I’d like to spend as much time possible writing code to solve scientific problems, rather than fighting with package managers, build systems, and bugs in libraries lacking maintainers to fix them. As far as I can tell, except for the efforts of particular library authors and the C++ Alliance, Boost has been largely stagnant. I support efforts to keep Boost and C++ relevant. Otherwise, folks like me will probably write new code in Rust rather than dealing with these issues. Adam P.S. To be fair, that ship has probably sailed for some of us. [1] [1] https://engineering.01cloud.com/2024/08/01/tractor-automating-the-transitio…

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Master branch is now open for bug fixes
by Marshall Clow 31 Jul '24

31 Jul '24

The master branch is now open for bug fixes and documentation changes. Other changes by release manager permission, as described in https://github.com/boostorg/wiki/wiki/Releases%3A-Beta-Merge-Policy Release manager permission is not needed for test changes or documentation changes. The next deadline: On August 7th, master closes for all changes. As always, the calendar is at https://www.boost.org/development/ — Marshall

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Requesting permission for a trivial change to LEAF
by Emil Dotchevski 29 Jul '24

29 Jul '24

It would be nice to include in the current release this small change that marks leaf::result objects as nodiscard: https://github.com/boostorg/leaf/commit/1f745805553934cd76a241649cd9bafa277… . Thanks, Emil

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[release] Boost 1.86.0 beta 1 released
by Marshall Clow 26 Jul '24

26 Jul '24

Boost release 1.86.0 beta 1 is now available at: https://boostorg.jfrog.io/artifactory/main/beta/1.86.0.beta1/source/ The SHA256 checksums are: 6c3b6b6b1760090ebd658b764c9006d9579df2a20763ede356e059fe52989277 boost_1_86_0_b1.tar.bz2 cc0e5c0fb54ea8762c2eb9fbfd185cb8ccbe1ad33c218883f9438dbe2f9a795b boost_1_86_0_b1.zip cad677f5b746bd83c68131766554b56ebf40eb7ba94823526b03820db9dbc049 boost_1_86_0_b1.7z 82b59c0ca4d3b8bbf910ffdbbf535ef738fa1d648b8ba6f2608b516a58f89c55 boost_1_86_0_b1.tar.gz Release notes (still need updates): https://www.boost.org/users/history/version_1_86_0.html Please try the beta and report any problems you encounter. Thanks to everyone who contributed to the release. Thanks especially to Sam Darwin for his help with the tools, and figuring out what happend with RC3. -- Boost Release Team

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Re: [boost] [release] Boost 1.86.0 Beta 1 Release Candidate 4 is available
by tobi＠die-loews.de 26 Jul '24

26 Jul '24

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[release] Boost 1.86.0 Beta 1 Release Candidate 4 is available
by Marshall Clow 25 Jul '24

25 Jul '24

[ RC3 was malformed as a result of some tooling failures ] The fourth (and hopefully final) RC for the 1.86.0 Beta release is now available. Available at: https://archives.boost.io/beta/1.86.0.beta1/source/ The SHA256 checksums are as follows: cad677f5b746bd83c68131766554b56ebf40eb7ba94823526b03820db9dbc049 boost_1_86_0_b1_rc4.7z 6c3b6b6b1760090ebd658b764c9006d9579df2a20763ede356e059fe52989277 boost_1_86_0_b1_rc4.tar.bz2 cc0e5c0fb54ea8762c2eb9fbfd185cb8ccbe1ad33c218883f9438dbe2f9a795b boost_1_86_0_b1_rc4.zip 82b59c0ca4d3b8bbf910ffdbbf535ef738fa1d648b8ba6f2608b516a58f89c55 boost_1_86_0_b1_rc4.tar.gz Changed libraries between RC2 and RC4: Boost.Process fixed some build issues on Windows As always, the release managers would appreciate it if you download the candidate of your choice and give building it a try. Please report both success and failure, and anything else that is noteworthy. -- The Release Managers

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