On 1:59 PM, John Maddock wrote:
Right, but then as I mention in a different thread, the maintainer/owner of the library can be MIA, and then I can ask the release managers and/or someone else who can pull the changes into their repository and shepherd the changes in. People (or in this case, I) can keep innovating and then the changes can get into the release in a less centralized manner -- which is the whole point of a decentralized system.
[...] Anyway, it seemed to me that the issue with patches for Boost.Pool and Boost.Iterators wasn't any inability to supply the patches to the 'official' place... it was an inability to get the attention of those who had the power to get the patches into 'official' Boost. Git won't change that.
I'm mostly staying out of this... but that sounds about right to me... at least we have a centralized place to put patches/bug reports/feature requests, what we really need is more folks to process them.
That's Boost.Guild's concept. See <http://jc-bell.com/contributions/boost-guild>
Further in order to process patches into the "official" release, we really need "that one guy" that just knows lib X inside out and can look at a patch and just know whether it's going to be OK or not. I'd say about 3/4 of the patches I get are spot on, and frankly I never fail to be impressed by the quality of a lot of them. But there's about a quarter that are either down right dangerous, or at least will cause more trouble down the line if applied. Often these problem patches aren't obviously problems, it's just that the person supplying them quite clearly doesn't have the time to really get to know the library inside out, so they can be supplied by perfectly trustworthy individuals. Hell, I may have submitted a few myself! Too many patches like that, and the whole thing can snowball, making it much harder to fix things properly down the road.
This is the rub. Boost.Guild ticket handlers <http://jc-bell.com/contributions/boost-guild/boost-ticket-handling> seem like the best bet, if new maintainers don't step up.
On the issue of library maintainers.... we don't actually need permanent full time maintainers for a lot of the older stuff... all they may need is a good spruce up every 5 years or so, with maybe the odd patch applied here and there in-between if there's a new compiler that causes issues. Maybe as well as bug sprints, we should organize a few "hit squads" to go after an older library, rejuvenate it and then move on to the next target.
I hadn't thought of roving "hit squads" but I like it. My thinking: some low level of continuous activity by a reasonably large group of people, each doing a little: fixing regressions, closing tickets.
In fact if folks think that might be a good idea, I might be moved to try and organize something....
Please do! Can I interest you in the Guild? Want to refine it? Run it?