[Boost-build] Community Library Maintainence Team - A modest proposal

Subject: [Boost-build] Community Library Maintainence Team - A modest proposal
From: Robert Ramey (ramey_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-05-12 09:51:12

Today at 12:45 in Bethe is the operations meeting of the Boost Community 
Library Maintainence team.  In advance of that meeting I'd like to render my 
proposal on this list so I have it written down.

Premise:The library maintainence team does not and will likely never have 
sufficient resources to maintain libraries without current maintainers.

Proposal:
a) The CMT will solicit volunteers to take over maintainence of specific 
libraries.

b) The most likely source of such volunteers are those working in companies 
which use and depend upon the libraries in maintainence.  Such companies 
will be expected to support the library maintainence by permitting the 
maintainer to undertake this effort using company time and resources.

c) Since we don't have a list of which companies are using which libraries, 
we will send a solicitation to volunteer to every person who has posted a 
bug report for the library in question on the TRAC system.  I believe this 
is the most likely source for prospective maintainers.

d) Companies that support maintainence of a particular library will be 
permited to place their logo and link on the TRAC page for that library.  So 
they will receive the following benefits from sponsoring the maintainece of 
the library.

1) They will be demonstrating their commitment to the high standard of 
software development that Boost supports.

2) By placing their logo and link on the track page, they will be 
encouraging and facilitating prospective employees who desire to work for 
such an organization to contact them.  That is, they will have a leg up on 
attracting the highest quality C++ programmers.

3) They will be guarenteed timely and rigorous maintainence of the library 
which they depend on.

4) They will have the inside track on proposing and implementing any library 
enhancements that they desire.

5) They will benefit from collaboration of the boost community which 
provides numerous valuable benefits:  Bug fixes submitted by users, 
suggestions for enhancements. etc.

The value of all these benefits to the sponsoring company will far, far out 
weigh the incremental cost of the employee time.  In many cases, since 
employees have to maintain the library anyway - the incremental cost is zero 
anyway.

This moves the responsibility for library maintainence to those most willing 
and able to undertake it.  The role of the CMT would be to promote, recruit, 
certify, and monitor library maintainence.  The CMT would have the authority 
to move the responsability from maintainer to another.  The current practice 
of having a single person/entity responsible for maintainence of a library 
would continue unchanged.

Robert Ramey