Edward Diener-3 wrote
Other than lengthening the formal review process to encourage more people to participate I do not see any means to get people more interested in reviewing Boost libraries. As far as the incubator is concerned I feel it is a good idea but nobody is using it to comment on libraries.
As far as Boost reviews it appears that most programmers are afraid to even make comments about a potential library in which they may be interested. Maybe the specter of C++ experts scares them away. Maybe they feel that they might look foolish if they make a comment which is based on just a partial understanding of the library involved.
If you select the "Display Statistics" Button on the Safe Numerics and display the last 60 days of activity, you can see that the library page has 50 visits. This is not a huge number. A book on Amazon might sell 1000 copies and get a couple of reviews (most of whom are likely the author's relatives). So as the incubator becomes more a "go to" place to look for libraries, the question of small number of reviews would solve itself. (hopefully). And of course if one can make a review at the moment he's decided to use or discard the library, it's more likely that, being in a state of ecstasy or frustration, he'll display his feelings by making a review while the facts and emotion are fresh in his mind.
Finally there is a decided problem with the lack of people willing to be review managers for a library.
Again, if we had more "pre-reviews" getting a review manager would be a snap. a) a library with a large number of negative pre-reviews will likely not even be selected for review. b) a library with no reviews suggests that it's not getting enough usage to be useful so maybe it's not worth reviewing. b) a library with a large number of positive reviews - it's easy to be the review manager. c) for the rest - well, at least the manager knows what he's in for. That might make it easier. In short, I would hope if we can make the incubator a success, it will help with the shortage of review managers. If any library in the incubator ever gets enough reviews, and gets reviewed, and passes review, I intend to leave all the reviews on display indefinitely. In fact, I intend to allow anyone to post review in the future. Current boost libraries vary a lot in quality but our current setup doesn't make that visible. Robert Ramey -- View this message in context: http://boost.2283326.n4.nabble.com/Boost-Incubator-Status-Report-tp4668747p4... Sent from the Boost - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.