On Thu, Aug 1, 2024 at 5:12 AM Andrey Semashev via Boost
My impression is that he is devoted to Boost, but rather emotional and ambitious, and that may sometimes cloud his judgment.
That is fair, yet that energy is also the source of positive changes.
I cannot be sure that his devotion to Boost won't change in the future or that he won't try to transform Boost into something that is not accepted by the wider Boost community.
The Alliance would be administering: * The boost.org domain * Related cloud services The Alliance cannot "transform Boost" with this any more than the Foundation could. We do not control the GitHub organization or the library repositories. The new website has been licensed under the BSL and donated. The idea that control of the domain equates to control over Boost is not a serious one. It is true that volunteers such as I can always decide to pack up and go elsewhere, and this has always been the case for Boost. Libraries become abandoned and require community maintenance. New volunteers are needed, and Alliance efforts to revitalize Boost are made in the hopes of bringing in more new contributors. The Foundation's "devotion to Boost" has already changed, which shows that a different bureaucratic structure is not necessarily better.
Regarding The C++ Alliance organization, its mission statement (https://cppalliance.org/#mission) doesn't even mention Boost.
Mission statements don't really mean much. They aren't legally enforceable and they can be changed at any time. The behavior over time is more reflective of intent than verbal postures. We could update the Alliance mission statement if you want...
In fact, it focuses on C++ advancement in general
Yes and I believe that C++ is advanced best by investing in Boost. It used to be the place where people submitted new libraries intended for the standard. It should be again, as Boost's development process is more aligned with users' interests. That is why the Alliance focuses all of its resources on Boost.
On the Boost Foundation side, I feel that its execution is far from perfect.
I can understand why. The Boost community of volunteers is... well, let's say "difficult." Doing big things is a giant pain in the ass, which I very much have first-hand experience with. And Boost needs big things. Foundation board members are understandably only able to devote a handful of hours a month to Boost, as they have regular jobs needed to put food on the table. The Alliance has a natural advantage here as its staff engineers work full-time on Boost.
Boost Foundation, as the owner of the infrastructure elements, should have been more proactive in exposing and solving the ongoing issues with it - whether by seeking volunteers in the community or hiring external staff.
There is no simple infrastructure fix, and a volunteer did step forward: the Alliance. The new website we have developed, is not merely a UI change. It implements all of the backend requirements needed to support Boost such as the commit-bot, updated release scripts, the mailman3 upgrade, and so forth. Thanks