David Abrahams wrote:
First things first: I want to call this program "Boost.Guild." Agreed?
At Sat, 06 Nov 2010 08:55:31 -0500, Jim Bell wrote:
Say you have a team of volunteers attacking failed regressions and tickets. They're creating (hopefully) good trunk patches. They can't commit to the trunk, but can modify tickets.
If maintainers are active, they could review and incorporate them. But this increased activity may be more of a strain for them. If maintainers are MIA, it won't happen.
So we need at least one person to bring these changes back into the trunk. Changes to libraries they're not familiar with.
BoostPro is willing to commit resources to help with that if there's someone else (like you) running the program with us. We'll need a list of libraries whose maintainers authorize such changes, and libraries whose maintainers want to control all changes themselves.
What's the best way for the volunteers to signal to these trunk-authority people to pick up their change?
modifying the ticket seems to work well - assuming there's an active maintainer.
A Ticket keyword and corresponding report should work. Is there a better way?
I can't think of one.
I don't think the volunteers themselves can be authorized to commit to trunk. We need more trusted people to do that.
I would like to clarify this. It's not a question of trust, it's more a question realizing that there has to be one person who is responsable for the integrity of the whole library. In a larger library, many patches and fixes will inadvertantly break something else. If you want someone to be responsable, he has has to have the authority to control all the changes. If changes go in from more than one person - then no one is responsable. It seems to me that the real problem here is that some libraries are not being maintained well enough. I realize that this is not easy to fix, but you won't make of for the lack of a person willing to be responsable for a library by spreading the authority among another group of people. The longer term solution is for boost to be more dynamic and decoupled so that unmaintained libraries eventually can get dropped without creating another fiasco. I also admit that this doesn't help things right now but there it is. Robert Ramey