I have been promoting the idea of people contributing any new functionality of GIL that they find useful by creating a GIL extension that is not originally in boost. This allows for an opportunity for people to try their code, flesh out some bugs, suggest changes to the design, etc. We can also use this as a mechanism to see how popular certain functionality is and use that to decide which functionality will make it into boost. That way, by the time it is proposed for inclusion into boost, the code will be more solid.
Yes, I have seen it, I use it, and hope to propose new things one day. But adding typedefs is not adding new functionalities. It's the normal usage of the library. If there is a bug here, it's a bug in gil itself not in the added code... So I define it in my code and use it without problem. Maybe we can add those typedefs at least in gil extensions ? If you want I can send you the code.