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[review][assign] Assign v2 review result
by John Bytheway 04 Jul '11

04 Jul '11

There was only one explicit review of the Assign v2 library, from Lars Viklund, which voted against inclusion. Other discussion about the library did not have an overwhelmingly positive tone. Therefore, the library is NOT accepted for Boost at this time. Some of the issues raised in discussion were: - The tutorial examples are terse, and move too quickly into the more advanced features of the library. - Code written with the library is too obtuse to those not familiar with it. - The naming conventions are unintuitive, in particular several people did not understand 'csv' without consulting the docs. - Does the impending arrival of initializer lists in C++0x render some or all of the functionality obsolete? - The documentation's performance metrics do not cover compile time. - There are portability issues to some less mainstream compilers. In conclusion, I think the review highlighted a few serious and interrelated issues with the library as it stands: 1. The scope of the library is not clear. If it is simply intended to save typing, and act as a filler for such things as initializer lists, then why does it need such complexity? On the other hand, if it is intended for more than this, then what is the motivation? The docs do not make this clear. 2. The tutorial moves too quickly, is unclear to newcomers, and lacks clear motivation for its examples. It would be better to spend more time explaining each example, perhaps with English or with equivalent code not using Assign v2. The existing Boost.Assign docs were compared favourably with the Assign v2 docs by more than one reviewer, and might serve as a model for improvement. 3. Code written with the library is obtuse and a developer unfamiliar with its ideas would be unable to decipher it without documentation. Furthermore, in some cases even with the existing documentation the intent of the code was unclear. For a task as conceptually simple as the library attempts to tackle it should be possible to make the code using it much more clear. There may be more problems with the library, but the presence of these issues prevented most reviewers investigating any more deeply. If Erwann wishes to continue his development of the library, and perhaps have it, or some subset of it, included in Boost in the future, then I recommend that he first establish a clearly motivated scope, and then strive for a syntax clear even to the uninitiated. I would like to thank Erwann again for all his hard work, and everyone who participated in the discussion during the review. John Bytheway Review Manager

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[Review] Type Traits Introspection library by Edward Diener starts tomorrow Friday 1
by Joel Falcou 01 Jul '11

01 Jul '11

According to the schedule, review for the Type Traits Introspection library by Edward Diener starts this friday and run till July 10th. =========== What is it? =========== The TTI library, which is an abbreviation for the 'Type Traits Introspection' library, allows a programmer to introspect at compile time the inner elements of a C++ type. The introspection process depends on specifying the name of the inner element by different macros for different types of elements, and then using a generated metafunction to determine whether that element exists within the enclosing type. The inner elements which can be introspected are type, class template, member data, member function, static member data, and static member function. The TTI library is based on the type_traits_ext portion of the Concept Traits Library, with improvements and additions, and also reproduces functionality ( without changing existing code ), for the purposes of completeness, from Boost.MPL regarding introspection of types and templates. The purpose of the library is to provide a consistent set of interfaces for doing compile-time introspection of a type, which other template metaprogrammers can use in their code. If you are at all interested in compile-time introspection of types, please take a look at the functionality of this library. =================== Getting the library =================== The library is available at http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/tti/ Note that this repository will be updated up to next thursday by Edward. =================== Writing a Review =================== The reviews and all comments should be submitted to the developers list, and the email should have "[TTI] Review" at the beginning of the subject line to make sure it's not missed. Please explicitly state in your review whether the library should be accepted. The general review checklist: - What is your evaluation of the design? - What is your evaluation of the implementation? - What is your evaluation of the documentation? - What is your evaluation of the potential usefulness of the library? - Did you try to use the library? With what compiler? Did you have any problems? - How much effort did you put into your evaluation? A glance? A quick reading? In-depth study? - Are you knowledgeable about the problem domain? And finally, every review should answer this question: - Do you think the library should be accepted as a Boost library? Be sure to say this explicitly so that your other comments don't obscure your overall opinion.

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[review][assign] Formal review of Assign v2 ends today
by John Bytheway 24 Jun '11

24 Jun '11

The formal review of the Assign v2 library upgrade by Erwann Rogard is scheduled to end today. Although there have been no actual reviews with formal votes, there has been useful discussion of the library, and we have chosen not to request an extension of the review. Despite the end of the review, please feel free to discuss the library further, make any final comments, or even submit a late review. I will certainly not declare the review request before next Monday, and will incorporate any comments made before then. I would like to thank all those who participated in the discussions, and Erwann for developing the library, and being so prompt in his responses during the review. A quick reminder of where to find more about the library: The documentation is online at: <http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/assign_v2/libs/assign/v2/doc/html/in…> With the change log at: <http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/assign_v2/libs/assign/v2/doc/html/bo…> The Assign v2 source can be found in the Boost sandbox at: <http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/assign_v2/> or downloaded from: <http://www.boostpro.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&filename=assign…> John Bytheway Review Manager

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[Review] The 'Type Traits Introspection' library Review starst next friday, july 1st
by Joel falcou 24 Jun '11

24 Jun '11

According to the schedule, review for the Type Traits Introspection library by Edward Diener will run from friday, July 1st to monday, july 10 2011. =========== What is it? =========== The TTI library, which is an abbreviation for the 'Type Traits Introspection' library, allows a programmer to introspect at compile time the inner elements of a C++ type. The introspection process depends on specifying the name of the inner element by different macros for different types of elements, and then using a generated metafunction to determine whether that element exists within the enclosing type. The inner elements which can be introspected are type, class template, member data, member function, static member data, and static member function. The TTI library is based on the type_traits_ext portion of the Concept Traits Library, with improvements and additions, and also reproduces functionality ( without changing existing code ), for the purposes of completeness, from Boost.MPL regarding introspection of types and templates. The purpose of the library is to provide a consistent set of interfaces for doing compile-time introspection of a type, which other template metaprogrammers can use in their code. If you are at all interested in compile-time introspection of types, please take a look at the functionality of this library. =================== Getting the library =================== The library is available at http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/tti/ Note that this repository will be updated up to next thursday by Edward. =================== Writing a Review =================== The reviews and all comments should be submitted to the developers list, and the email should have "[TTI] Review" at the beginning of the subject line to make sure it's not missed. Please explicitly state in your review whether the library should be accepted. The general review checklist: - What is your evaluation of the design? - What is your evaluation of the implementation? - What is your evaluation of the documentation? - What is your evaluation of the potential usefulness of the library? - Did you try to use the library? With what compiler? Did you have any problems? - How much effort did you put into your evaluation? A glance? A quick reading? In-depth study? - Are you knowledgeable about the problem domain? And finally, every review should answer this question: - Do you think the library should be accepted as a Boost library? Be sure to say this explicitly so that your other comments don't obscure your overall opinion.

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[1.47.0] Beta 1 Release Notice
by Beman Dawes 21 Jun '11

21 Jun '11

Boost release 1.47.0 beta 1 is now available from SourceForge See http://sourceforge.net/projects/boost/files/ New Libraries: Chrono, Geometry, Phoenix and Ratio. Updated Libraries: Accumulators, Asio, Config, DateTime, Dynamic Bitset, Foreach, Function, Function Types, Graph, Iterator, Lexical Cast, Logic, Math, Meta State Machine, MultiIndex, Proto, Spirit, Tokenizer, Utility, Wave For details of what's in the release, see http://beta.boost.org/users/news/version_1_47_0. Note that the links to files on this web page are for the final release - use the SourceForge link above to get the beta files. There have been reports of build issues with MinGW/CGG and 64-bit Windows/VC++. These are being investigated and hopefully should be cleared up before the final release Please download the beta, give it a try, and report any problems you encounter. Thanks, -- The Boost Release Team Beman Dawes Daniel James Eric Niebler Rene Rivera Vladimir Prus

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[boost] [review] [heap] Summary
by Andrew Sutton 18 Jun '11

18 Jun '11

The formal review of Tim Blechmann's Heap library has concluded. Only four votes were cast, although more people commented on issues either on the mailing list or though the Code Collaborator tool. However, from the comments received, the review identified no fundamental problems in the design or implementation of the library that would entail rejection. A such, the Boost.Heap library is ACCEPTED into Boost Votes for the library were cast by: Phil Endecott Daniel Russel Votes against: Thomas Klimpel (provisionally) Andrew Sutton Other comments received during the course of the review were generally positive, with a number of technical issues identified that need to to be addressed. The final version of the library can be fully accepted once Tim has addressed the technical issues identified during the review. Below is a summary of technical concerns. - The pairing heap has a known issue, regarding stack overflows, making it potentially unusable for production code. If the recursion issue can't be adequately solved, then the data structure should carry a much stronger warning label (i.e., put it in an experimental directory). - The performance of b_heap vs. d_ary_heap vs. priority_queue needs to be better characterized. Under what circumstances does one outperform the other. If no convincing scenario can be found where b_heap outperforms the others, then it should also be placed in an experimental directory. - The heap concepts need to be revisited as per comments on the review tool. The concepts should also describe semantics of the operations, not just the interfaces. - There were several comments on the implementation of heap stability. Three alternatives were identified: “naturally stable” heaps (of which no examples were given), the current counter based approach, and a chaining approach. No consensus on the best implementation strategy. Although the counter-based approach is probably adequate for most applications, it is not universally desirable. A more thorough investigation of alternative strategies is encouraged. It would be acceptable to document the investigation in a “Future Work” section of the library documentations (with any experiments also housed in the library). - The notion of Mergeable heaps needs to be better addressed, at least to differentiate between heaps that merge in O(n) or slower time and those that can merge in O(lg n) time. The proposed solution is to write merge as a general heap algorithm and specialize it for Mergeable heaps by calling the member function merge. Also, merge should be destructive, so merge and clear should not be needed. - The documentation must be substantially improved with respect to the overall design of heap data structures (i.e., concepts), especially mutable heaps and best practices. It also needs to provide both theoretical and performance comparisons for the different heaps. - Include documentation of the benchmarking tool in the documentation. It could be instructive for users to evaluate different heap implementations on their host or target architectures. - Document the complexity of == and < for heaps. - Address the comments and issues in the Review Tool. There were other recommendations that should be considered in the long term for the library. - Thorsten Ottosen suggest making b_heap and d_ary_heap container adaptors along the lines of std::stack, std::queue, and std::priority_queue, allowing parameterization over (e.g., stack-based container). Subsequent discussion indicates that there are some impracticalities in doing so, namely that it could invalidate other policies (e.g., stability). - Phil Endecott suggested rewriting some heaps (b_heap and d_ary_heap) in terms of more general algorithms operating on a (Random Access) Range in order to support the formulation of heap structures on other memory structures. Doing this would also help support the definition of heaps that satisfied Thorsten's request. I strongly recommend investigating Phil's suggestion, but this is not a barrier to acceptance. This feature could be added in future revisions of the library. I'd like to thank the community members who took the time to review Tim's work and especially those that submitted formal reviews. I'd also like to thank Tim (again) for his contributions and patiently answering our questions and addressing our comments. Andrew _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe & other changes: http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost

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[review][assign] Formal review of Assign v2 begins 15th June
by John Bytheway 14 Jun '11

14 Jun '11

The formal review of the Assign v2 library upgrade by Erwann Rogard starts tomorrow, June 15th and is scheduled to continue until June 24th. About Assign v2 =============== Assign v2 is an upgrade of Boost.Assign (1.0) that redefines its functionality, with optional C++0x support and new features. It is a compact interface for executing the repetitive tasks of assigning or inserting container elements. Please see the change log (linked below) for more detail on the motivation for this library and pointers for navigating the documentation. Where to get it =============== The documentation is online at: <http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/assign_v2/libs/assign/v2/doc/html/in…> With the change log at: <http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/assign_v2/libs/assign/v2/doc/html/bo…> The Assign v2 source can be found in the Boost sandbox at: <http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/assign_v2/> or downloaded from: <http://www.boostpro.com/vault/index.php?action=downloadfile&filename=assign…> Review guidelines ================= Reviews should be submitted to the developer list (boost(a)lists.boost.org) with '[assign]' in the subject. Or if you don't wish to for some reason, you can send them privately to me. If so, please let me know whether or not you'd like your review to be forwarded to the list. All reviews are appreciated, even if you don't have time for an in-depth study. The Assign v2 library consists of several largely independent components: Reference containers and chaining, container modification and generation, and conversion of ranges to containers. If you wish, feel free to review and even vote on these separately. For your review you may wish to consider the following questions: - What is your evaluation of the design? - What is your evaluation of the implementation? - What is your evaluation of the documentation? - What is your evaluation of the potential usefulness of the library? - Did you try to use the library? With what compiler? Did you have any problems? - How much effort did you put into your evaluation? A glance? A quick reading? In-depth study? - Are you knowledgeable about the problem domain? And finally, every review should answer this question: - Do you think the library should be accepted as a Boost library? Be sure to say this explicitly so that your other comments don't obscure your overall opinion. More detail on the review process is available at: http://www.boost.org/community/reviews.html John Bytheway Review Manager

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[boost] [review] Heaps
by Andrew Sutton 31 May '11

31 May '11

All, I'd like to announce the beginning of the review of the Heap library, written by Tim Blechmann, and resulting from Tim's 2010 Google Summer of Code project The library implements a number of different heaps (or priority queues) including, a binary heap, d-ary heap, binomial heap, fibonacci heap, pairing heap, and skew heap. The library also provides an adaptor to make heaps mutable, allowing a programmer to modify a value and update its position within the heap. The library also also supports stability, ensuring that elements pushed into a heap with the same priority are popped in the same order. The library is not targeted in any specific domain nor directly related to any specific libraries, but intended to be a collection of general purpose data structures (not unlike the Boost.Unordered library). The documentation and source code can be downloaded from here: Documentation: http://tim.klingt.org/boost_heap Code: http://tim.klingt.org/git?p=boost_heap.git;a=snapshot;h=HEAD;sf=tgz Unlike previous reviews, this review will be assisted by a code review application, Code Collaborator (by SmartBear). The product was tested during a BoostCon session, and we are eager to see how well it scales to a community review. You can use the link below to access and review the Heap library. http://demo.smartbear.com/boost/go?page=ReviewDisplay&reviewid=4 The application allows line-by-line comments of the submitted source code in addition to providing features for general defect and issue reporting. If you are interested in using this system, we will have to register you as a user of the site. You can request access by replying to this message. I'm still learning my way around the system, so there are bound to be some missteps along the way :) If you are not interested in using the system, then feel free to send email like any other review. Reviews of the library should address the following questions. What is your evaluation of the design? What is your evaluation of the implementation? What is your evaluation of the documentation? What is your evaluation of the potential usefulness of the library? Did you try to use the library? With what compiler? Did you have any problems? How much effort did you put into your evaluation? A glance? A quick reading? In-depth study? Are you knowledgeable about the problem domain? And finally, every review should answer this question: Do you think the library should be accepted as a Boost library? Be sure to say this explicitly so that your other comments don't obscure your overall opinion. Please note that some questions may be easier to answer in email than with the review tool. As always, reviews are important to the continued quality of the Boost C++ Libraries. Thank you in advance for your comments and contributions. Andrew PS. The review was slated to start on Sunday, but I was not able to make the announcement until today. _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe & other changes: http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost

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Boost Steering Committee
by Beman Dawes 27 May '11

27 May '11

There was a special session Friday morning at BoostCon 2011 to announce the formation of a Boost Steering Committee. The slides from that session have been annotated to make them more comprehensible to those not present. See http://tinyurl.com/3l27o3q (There is also a link on steering.boost.org, but DNS isn't resolving that yet for me. Instead use https://sites.google.com/a/boost.org/steering/) We haven't yet decided anything beyond what is on the slides, so it will take a bit of time before details emerge. As the slides mention, the first job of the steering committee is to design of its own operating procedures and policies. Input from the Boost community will help form those procedures and policies. The steering committee is an important change in the way Boost operates! We hope it will position Boost to continue to grow and prosper. --The Boost Steering Committee Beman Dawes Dave Abrahams Hartmut Kaiser Jeff Garland Jon Kalb Marshall Clow Robert Stewart Steven Wantanabe

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[review][autoindex] AutoIndex review result
by Daniel James 24 May '11

24 May '11

The AutoIndex reviews were unanimously in favour of inclusion so it has been accepted into Boost. Reviews were submitted by: Edward Diener, Paul A. Bristow, Barend Gehrels and Hartmut Kaiser. Artyom also took part. Some of the general issues that were raised: The name should be more consistent. There was a little confusion about installation, but this should be easier once it's part of boost. Since it works at the docbook level it can be a bit confusing for a pure quickbook user. We might need to add extra support to quickbook - possibly in the form of a template library. There was some confusion about the integration of the different documentation tools, e.g. the use of <quickbook-define> to optionally include content in quickbook, using 'xinclude' to include doxygen documentation in quickbook. I think this is more of a weakness of the quickbook documentation. A few reviewers wanted finer grained control over where index terms are inserted. It isn't clear how this could be done without adding too much complexity. Adding processing instructions to the xml is one possibility. The C++ header scanner picks up too many symbols for spirit (and will possibly do so for other libraries), some kind of annotation or configuration might help. Thanks to everyone who participated in the review, and to John Maddock for developing AutoIndex, Daniel James

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