Robert Ramey wrote:
I understand that as boost gets bigger it gets harder to make new releases. There is more to do, more to keep in sync, and more ripple effect in changes. I see this more structured and formal release procedure as an attempt to deal with this. It seems to aim for a closer coordination of developement and release efforts to avoid difficulties associated with development of software libraries which have varying degrees of coupling.
That is certainly part of the idea.
Basically, I don't believe the current Boost developement model is scalable and I think the procedure has to change to recognise this. So in my view the current proposal goes in exactly the wrong direction.
I can see your point. I would like to postpone this discussion until after 1.34 because I strongly believe that it is just too late for 1.34 to make major changes.
Note that this is starting to occur by necesity. Multi-index has a "beta" version compatible with 1.33 that one can download. I've been testing changes to serialization on my machine against 1.33. I haven't checked them into the HEAD. So now I know what problems are mine and what problems are associated with changes in compiler versions, stlport versions etc. My next step is to make a few more changes, run some more tests locally (basically later version of stlport) and upload a package similar to Joaquin's. This would make the changes (mostly bug fixes and documentation upates) available to those who need them now and also give those who want to help me out a way to test my changes without waiting for the next release when it will be too late to fix anything.
I have doubts that we have the infrastructure in place that would be needed for this. This might be different once we switched to subversion. Thanks Thomas -- Thomas Witt witt@acm.org