On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 10:02 PM, Edward Diener <eldiener@tropicsoft.com> wrote:
On 12/27/2010 11:42 PM, Dean Michael Berris wrote:
About the review process, the problem with the time limit that I see is the amount of work required to throughly look at a library usually doesn't fit in one week. And then the really deeper looks require quite a bit of discussion to clarify points and make sure that the reviewer and the library author(s) get to respond to questions and/or gather feedback regarding the implementation. By making the review process more of a collaborative development process instead of an "I'm finished, is it good enough?" thing, you can involve more people and encourage community building around your library.
I agree with you that the time limit for most reviews is too narrow. It barely leaves time for someone to investigate a library and write a good review. I believe any review should last a month or more. At the same time I do not see why more than one review can not go on at any time. If each review lasted a month minimum, perhaps as long as two months, but a number of reviews were going on at the same time, then possible Boost libraries would not languish in the queue so long.
+1 Actually, I'd +2 if you said a review should be open until the library gets into the main distribution. And even after that, reviewing the quality of the library should be on-going and shouldn't stop at the point of inclusion into Boost. ;)
I do not however see reviews as a collaborative development process. I dislike your notion of software development as a community process. Software design is almost always an individual conception and no amount of community involvement is going to change that. Of course a developer can be influenced by the comments of others about the particulars of a software library. But I can never believe that a community of people can effectively design a software library no matter what proof you may want to try to bring from other environments like Linux and other open source projects.
Okay, it might not convince you so I won't try too hard. Two projects come to mind: WebKit and Qt. Also, I've been in many different situations where only the collaborative method is the one that works to think otherwise. ;) -- Dean Michael Berris about.me/deanberris