David Abrahams wrote:
All ---
I tried, I really did, to resolve the trunk and release branches of my libraries for the upcoming release. But the truth is that I'm finding Boost's current interdependent structure and the sluggishness of SVN on a project of our size just makes everything too hard to do. I'm now just declaring openly what has effectively been true for the past couple of months: I'm not maintaining my libraries until I complete the transition to Git that goes along with using Ryppln (http://ryppl.org). I'm sorry, I know it's not good or right, but I know it's going to be for the best in the long run. That should all happen fairly quickly now, anyway.
-- David Abrahams BoostPro Computing http://boostpro.com
Dave, having a single library to maintain I probably cannot fully appreciate your situation. However, I would like to attract your attention to the very special position you have in this community, especially among newcomers I count myself with. Seeing dave (I mean THE dave! ;-) ) not maintaining his libraries creates a precedent and sends a wrong signal, which deals a blow to boost's credibility. Companies could wonder, waow, if the community cannot even help dave maintain his libraries, in which state must be others? Also considering that ryppl is so far not a reality yet and not even agreed on, we need a solution for the time being. Why not simply request help from the community to which you brought so much? I'm sure that many would be happy to help you on this. So, concretely, what is the problem? Do you have no time handling the feature requests or is svn the problem? If it is just about merging and doing some mechanical svn-related tasks, this is a very workable solution and I gladly offer my help. If it is about feature requests, this is a more complicated one (but seemingly unrelated to svn) and you could also ask for support on this list. Surely, someone competent will step forward and free you from much work. You could simply review patches before commit. It would also help the community by having more than one person familiar with your libraries. Christophe PS: Thinking about it more, it would be a good idea if every boost author would mentor one or several "young" members who could take over when the author's situation changes. In any company, we usually try to avoid having only one person knowing a subject. Maybe a boostcon would be a good place where authors would explain the inside of their library?