Re: [Boost-maint] Community Maintenance Team and neglected libraries

Subject: Re: [Boost-maint] Community Maintenance Team and neglected libraries
From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-05-15 21:58:46

On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 12:10 PM, Andrey Semashev <andrey.semashev_at_[hidden]
> wrote:

> On Wednesday 23 April 2014 00:29:17 Ben Pope wrote:
> > In case you haven't heard of the CMT:
> > https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/wiki/CommunityMaintenance
> >
> > I'm also interested in getting the test results less yellow and more
> > green, I don't have a lot of time, I'm sure I'm not alone.
> >
> > There are quite a few places where the library code is probably fine,
> > but the failure is in the test itself, the fix is often simple and
> > uncontroversial.
> >
> > These easy fixes should just happen; make a pull request, ticket with
> > patch, whatever; commit goes in; reminder when tests have cycled; merged
> > to master; profit.
>
> This is a recurring topic and unfortunately the problem still stands. CMT
> was
> a step forward, but to my mind this is not enough. With SVN we had commit
> rights everywhere, and such simple fixes went in much easier. After
> modularization some libraries were left effectively unmaintained and
> inaccessible. CMT does have rights to push to some libraries but not all
> and
> therefore does not fix the problem completely.
>

We've been discussing such issues in steering committee, release
management, and community maintenance sessions at C++Now this week, with a
couple of more sessions scheduled that will address library review concerns.

The details will evolve over time, but the CMT is gaining more
responsibility and is being given authority to respond to pull requests to
any library when the maintainer isn't available to respond. As procedures
evolve, that will expand to cover more situations - pull requests are just
the starting point for a general need to be responsive to various kinds of
requests.

>
> To my mind CMT should have access to all libraries, maintained or not. If a
> given library is actively maintained then CMT doesn't need to intervene.
> However, if the maintainer goes silent for considerable time, CMT has the
> ability to apply such fixes.
>

Yes, that's more or less the approach that has gained support. The actual
mechanism will be to continue to limit the CMT write permissions to CMT
maintained libraries, but have small group of senior developers within the
CMT who have write permissions to all libraries.

--Beman