On Tue, Dec 17, 2024 at 6:06 AM John Maddock via Boost < boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:
This is interesting... somewhat, but I'm not sure how useful it is at present, or how well it reflects the overall "health" of your favorite library.
Thanks for the feedback. The release report is aimed at contributors, not end users. This is a little something to help recognition of effort. For end users we put this information directly on the website itself. For example, Boost.Math shows everyone who contributed to the last release and they are sorted descending by the number of commits: https://www.boost.io/library/1.87.0/math/ The "health" of libraries should be reflected on the website since that will affect the new or returning user experience. I'm not sure how we want to reflect it so some experimentation is probably needed. The release report is pretty rough since it is the first version and we will continue to iterate on it. Something that might be useful to see, would be two lists: one of
libraries with no commits, and one with no issues fixed. That might help focus minds on which libraries need community assistance, and which should quite frankly be deprecated. I notice that some of the libraries listed only have "infrastructure" commits which would also count as "no real maintenance".
There are a couple of ways to go about this. One is that we can do some elaborate analysis of the repositories. On the other hand, there are only a finite number of repos. We could just manually mark the ones we believe should be "deprecated." I brought up the idea of deprecating libraries and there was a lot of opposition. So deprecation per-se might not be the right path. Instead we could just mark the libraries on the site and provide some sorting options. I'm happy to hear ideas on what to do.
BTW if this is intended for end users, then I think something closer to a "press release" - with all the work entailed in writing that - would be much more appropriate.
It is really just for contributors. They deserve something special. There's a place for the FSC to communicate on every release. I'm hoping that as we iterate on this it becomes more valuable and useful for bringing the volunteers together, building a sense of pride and accomplishment, and general good feels. Thanks