On March 9, 2026 10:52:26 PM Vinnie Falco <vinnie.falco@gmail.com> wrote:
tl;dr for Peter:
Low visibility produces few early adopters. Few early adopters produce thin reviews. Thin reviews produce costly libraries. Costly libraries produce low visibility.
Four lines in the release notes break the cycle at the cheapest point.
Unrelated content makes release notes less useful to the intended reader, to the point of being annoying.
wall of text for Andrey:
I do hear the scope objection, but I think the premise is narrower than the release notes actually are. The release notes have never been limited to code changes in the tarball. Every release notes page has a "New Libraries" section that reports an ecosystem event - a library passed review during this cycle.
No, it reports what's been added to the release. If a library has passed the review but has not been included in the release (e.g. due to a review ending too late), it wouldn't be mentioned in the notes.
The notes also list removed libraries, updated tools, and known issues. The scope already includes "things that happened to Boost since the last release."
Not what happened but what changed in the new release. Endorsement is not such a change.
An endorsed library is one step earlier in the same pipeline. Endorsement is a formal community action with a public record on this list.
To be frank, I never fully understood the point of endorsement. If I endorse a library, does it mean I'm obligated to write a review? It's a difficult promise to make since endorsements are made before the review time frame is set. And since I bothered to endorse, does it mean I promise my review will be positive? I don't remember examples of the opposite. I don't think the answers to the above questions should be "yes". I guess, you can consider endorsements as an indication of community interest, but not more than that. There are many ways to express interest, why not report on that? If anything, I would rather the repotring increased the interest to the proposed library, regardless of endorsements. A news item on the web site about a proposed library with a short description and an invitation to discuss and review it would be a good thing.
Reporting it is no different in kind from reporting that a new library was accepted or a tool was updated.
Yes, but where that reporting is done matters. Release notes is not the right place, as endorsements are not relevant to the purpose of that document.
Andrey, you diagnosed this problem sixteen years ago. In March 2010 you wrote: "Boost is rather closed to its community. I don't know how it happens, but on independent news I regularly read of such projects as KDE, GNOME, Qt, Linux Kernel and others, but nearly nothing about Boost. The Boost web site changes rarely - essentially, the news column only lists recent Boost releases. For an outsider, nothing really happens around Boost, and that's sad. If Boost was more open and communicated to the public, I think, there would be much more activity in Boost, and during reviews in particular."
That is exactly the problem this proposal addresses. The release notes are the one document where outsiders actually look.
That's not *why* they look in that document. They come there for one purpose and the document must serve that purpose well. You've made a new beautiful website, use it to better expose proposed libraries. You have socials to notify people.