Re: [boost] XXX owner unresponsive to persistent problems for multiple years (was: [test] boost.test owner ...)

On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 1:54 AM, Stephen Kelly wrote:

Adam Wulkiewicz wrote:

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Olaf Van Der Spek wrote:

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On Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 9:50 PM, Robert Ramey wrote:

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http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel/256063 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel/256571 I'm disputing there is a problem with orphaned libraries. But just Are you or are you not? ;)

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letting anyone check in changes is not the solution. Transfering maintenance responsibility to another person is the only real solution I think having multiple maintainers is an even better solution.

Furthermore it wouldn't be a problem for the "community" to review pull requests if such additional maintainer needed some help. AFAIU the difference between Boost and many of the other open-source projects is that Boost is not one monolithic library/project but a group or container of libraries. Specific libraries has always been bound tightly with their authors. And with per-submodule access rights on GitHub this is even more noticeable.

This is my impression too. Well said.

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We could think about relaxing this bound and go towards slightly more distributed model.

I'd like to see others' feedback on your ideas.

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I'm guessing that those hanging pull requests and patches on trac discourages people from the "outside" to get involved in the evelution of a library, find and fix bugs, etc.

Not to mention that some of the code is unmaintainable in its current state, and needs some clean-up/modernization in order to become maintainable. The current way Boost seems to work is to prefer not to modernize in any way and choose the 'not changed means not (newly) broken' model.

Thanks,

Steve.

I agree. Having two or more maintainers assure quicker feedback to contributors. I think there is a similar problem with Boost.Random. There're 11 open pull request (one of them is mine ;) ) the older of which is nearly 1 year old. Maybe, it's time to make a poll to find out what libs are or are not maintained... Best, Marco