On 4/17/25 6:51 PM, Peter Dimov via Boost wrote:
I agree, and.. I've wondered about that requirement. Is it really needed? If an established Boost developer has a good amount of professional experience they are likely to be able to tackle most programming domains at the level needed for managing a review. Should we reconsider that requirement? For example I would consider myself to know enough to manage the Bloom review. But...
Given that the review manager is the one solely responsible for deciding whether a library deserves acceptance, it would be strange not to require a certain, fairly high level of expertise.
The domain-specific expertise should come from the reviewers; the review manager should (minimally) just be qualified enough to evaluate the reviews.
General C++ expertise is more important for the review manager because he is supposed to help the submitter prepare the library so that it's suitable for Boost.
I think it's pretty hard to set a specific policy here. Take a library like serialization. Most of us would be comfortable being review manager as we know what the domain is about and something about the features which different approaches. Take a library like safe_numerics. I think this would require a review manager with above average knowledge of numerical analysis. So I think the current process for selecting review managers is fine. Of course there will be issues from time to time. 1) Sometimes the review manager way underestimates the amount of time it will take to do the review. So the result is delayed. In at least one case I know of the review manager flaked out entirely. I'm sure there are more such chases. 2) It's hard to find a qualified reviewer for some libraries. No easy fix. The only thing that occurs to me that in our communications/announcements we increase the level of recognition for review manager - more or less to the level of that of author. This would be in the hope of making RM to be sufficiently prestigious that he might be motivated to note the fact that he was RM on his resume and/or other credentials. Personal experience note: I'm the author of the boost safe numerics library. I developed it incrementally over many years on my own until I felt it was ready to submit to boost. It had all the boost requirements: documentation, tests, etc. etc. I submitted it and it was accepted into Boost with conditions. I believe that Andrey Semashev was the review manager. I should know this for sure off the top of my head. The fact that I don't illustrates my point above. I was ecstatic to get this news and went right to work making modifications to full fill the conditions and other issues Andre had flagged on his own. In doing this task, I realized that the library was much, much lower quality than I had thought. In cleaning up these "nits" I found lots and lots of other issues : concepts not agreeing with code, undetected errors, etc, etc. The same thing happened with the serialization library ~24 years ago. At that time I had an excuse: I was still learning C++ (I'm forgetting it now). But this time ... I was honestly appalled and disheartened with my own work. With Andres help, I managed to fix everything. But I've learned so much in the meantime, that I'm tempted to make another pass over the library to make it more formally correct and eliminate unnecessary requirements. From feedback I get from users, and some statistics, I believe that the library has pretty good up take. I don't think this be so much the case without Andre's collaboration. This may not be true for other authors and their libraries, but it's a fact that it's true for mine. So maybe we should highlight/promote more of the contributions of reviewers and review manager in our documentation and promotional material (announcements of library acceptance, etc.). (do we have promotional material?) In fact we should spend a little more effort in promoting boost, libraries, authors and reviewers. Did you know that the boost serialization library is used in the software that runs "icecube" - huge project in antarctica which I believe is used to study neutrinos or something like that. I only found out about this by accident (no not that kind of accident). It's a huge motivator for me to be associated with a project like that - albeit peripherally. Robert Ramey