On 1 March 2015 at 03:40, Steven Watanabe
AMDG
On 02/28/2015 08:20 PM, Edward Diener wrote:
Do we then say that because a library no longer has a primary maintainer who created the library that no changes to the library except for bug fixes should ever be made ?
Absolutely, unless someone new is willing to take responsibility for the library. I would be much more conservative about this for MPL than for most other libraries, given how fundamental it is.
That is very unrealistic consider that very few creators of a library are willing to maintain that library perpetually, which is only natural.
I'm not really following this thread, but FWIW I reverted the changes for 2 reasons: 1) they are large and non-trivial, and no one seems to have a particularly good understanding of the library, 2) Many of the the corresponding changes in dependent libraries haven't been merged. I was especially worried about dependants because I had just discovered (by coincidence) that a change in type traits which had broken several libraries in master and no one had noticed. These things really aren't adequately monitored. There's also the possibility that these changes can break third party code - the issue of what is and isn't private to boost has never been clear. I really think people underestimate the value of a stable code base. I imagine all of this would be a lot easier if boost had separate stable and unstable releases. But we don't, so IMO the best way forward for MPL is to have a new, unstable version, probably concentrating on recent versions of the standard. Alternatively the plan to factor out the "core" of the library might result in a simpler, easier to maintain core containing things people care about, and a less stable repo for the rest of it.