One should recognize here that there is a strong form of self-selection happening; the "top committers" are those individuals who have the desire/motivation/incentive to spend a substantial fraction of their professional and/or personal time refining their knowledge of the details of Boost. For someone who is a Boost consultant (several of whom appear at the top of the aforementioned list) this is clearly a worthwhile investment and, in fact, having a complex tool chain and difficult to master systems is advantageous in that it increases the potential demand for consulting work. A simpler and easier-to- understand tool chain would presumably lower barriers to entry and increase participation from individuals
And I am talking mostly about transitioning to git here. You can't be seriously saying that git is a simpler and easier-to-understand tool?
No. What I'm saying is that using the "top committers" to determine if the toolchain is working well is only a reasonable thing to do if you want to exclude everyone with less time to spend mastering said toolchain from contributing. Mastery of the toolchain or, more importantly, lack thereof, doesn't necessarily say much about someone's knowledge of a problem domain that would benefit Boost. I really have no opinion on git vis-a-vis any of the myriad other version control systems out there. In general, I agree that it is best to err on the side of sticking with tried and true rather than hopping on the latest bandwagon, but only if the latest bandwagon doesn't represent a real and significant step forward in simplicity/transparency/usability... And I feel that Boost would benefit from such steps. I guess, as a physicist who uses computational/software tools as a means to an end, I feel the same way about complex and arcane software build systems as a software engineer would feel about having to open up their computer and solder stuff on the motherboard in order to get the compiler to work... Matthias