Robert Ramey wrote:
Stephen Kelly-2 wrote
Paul A. Bristow wrote:
a situation where a lone worker was solely controlling a key library used by almost all others.
Isn't that exactly how boost is designed to work?
I'm not sure how was boost was designed - or evolved ( I suppose it depends upon one's religion).
The most stark difference between Boost and KDE is that a KDE contributor can push to all KDE repositories. The same is not true of Boost, and it is designed that way. You write below it is a good thing. I don't agree. I think there's a better middle ground to arrive at. That is also a contributor to why there are so many unmaintained libraries in Boost. Far more libraries than are listed as the responsibility of the CMT are actually unmaintained in reality - the dead pull requests and desperate mails like http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel/256063 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel/256571 show that. You might want to make a list of what is actually maintained instead and then decide if you want to do anything about that.
It promotes conceptual integrity and makes for smaller, decoupled libraries.
Decoupled? Erm, WAT? That is definitely, simply, not a true description of Boost for many many reasons. Check your illusions :).
One thing we do is that once a library is accepted, it shuts the door to anyone proposing alternatives.
There is definitely no consensus on this http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel/255318/focus=255359 Another instance showing that there isn't generally cohesive opinion in Boost. Maybe another effect of the lone-wolf design.
If we had statistics on library usage, we could drop accepted libraries from the "standard" distribution when they fall out of favor.
There are so many strong opinions opposed to that, you'd have to form something of a community based on consensus before actually doing it. Thanks, Steve.