Re: [Boost-users] Maintenace Guidelines wiki page

Subject: Re: [Boost-users] Maintenace Guidelines wiki page
From: vicente.botet (vicente.botet_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-11-23 05:29:55

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tomas Puverle" <Tomas.Puverle_at_[hidden]>
To: <boost-users_at_[hidden]>
Sent: Sunday, November 23, 2008 4:31 AM
Subject: Re: [Boost-users] Maintenace Guidelines wiki page

> 
>> I have started the Maintenace Guidelines wiki page. 
>> 
>> You can access it directly 
>> https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/wiki/Guidelines/MaintenanceGuidelines
>> 
>> or via https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/wiki
>> 
>> Guidelines
>>     * Maintenance Guidelines 
>> 
>> There page need to be completed and surely reworked but this is an starting 
>> point.
>> 
>> Please be free to improve the page directly or post your comments or
> suggestions to this list.
>> 
>> Hopping this goes on the right direction,
> 
> Vincente,
> 
> A few ideas:  How will you evaluate that your proposal is actually successful
> and being followed by the boost developers?

Hi,

First this is proposal for guidelines. So people will be after all free to follow some of them or not. I'm expecting from people like you to improve it so it could be followed by more people.

> Also, check out Daniel Walker's idea in the Boost.Range thread on boost.devel
> about not having the engineers in charge of their own QA.
Daniel Walker's idea "
Perhaps a procedural solution that could avert this problem in the
future is to quarantine the test cases. Authors can maintain commit
privileges to their libraries on trunk, but only a select group of
independent guardians have commit privileges to the test cases. That
way there is a guarantee that libraries pass the same tests from one
release to another. If an author would like to make a change that
would break a test case, he or she would need to present the change to
the list and submit a patch to the test case sentinels. This would be
a fairly simple quality assurance protocol: engineers aren't allowed
to do their own QA."

This is already considered on the guidelines insome way.
"Preserve the test from the preceding versions [author] 
The test from the preceding versions should not be changed when the author modifies its library. These not changed tests are a probe of compatibility with the preceding version. When these test must be changed they indicate a breaking user code issue. So instead of changing them add new ones stating explicitly on which version they were included. Old tests that should fail can be moved to the compile_fail or run_fail tests on the Jamfile. "

The Daniel proposal implies some changes in the writing rights of the authors. I prefer to let this point out of these guidelines. Of course I think that this is a good idea.

There is another guideline that could be used by the Boost comunity to check the author has not changed the old test cases.

"Inspect announced modifications [author, user, RM] 

The use of the diff file will help to inspect that the modifications introduced have been correctly included on the documentation and a good test coverage has been done. This will result in a non official mini-review of the library. "

I will add to check that the old testcases have not been changed.

> Finally, please consider the idea of "core" and "new" release cycles, where the
> components in "core" have much more stringent requirements on how and when they
> are allowed to change.

IMO this is out of the scope of the guidelines. Note that at the end it is up to the author to make the modification he/she consider pertinent. Could you send what you have in mind in the form of guidelines?
 
> Finally, do you think it may have been better to start this thread on 
> boost.devel?

I belived that i did it on both. I'm answering to both each time.  
Should I start a new thread including the guidelines contents?
Vicente