On 31 Oct 2013 at 19:00, Stephen Kelly wrote:
I am personally strongly in favour of libraries getting deprecated and removed from releases if they are not maintained - let's say no [snip] With 68 libraries in a circular-dependent mesh, how do you expect that would work?
Judging from that dependency graph you posted a while ago, you're right there is a small core of libraries where deprecation due to lack of maintenance can't work. It's a reasonable bet however that none of those core libraries has ever seen two major releases pass without a bug fix, so therefore those are moot. If, however, there IS a core library highly used by other libraries which has seen open bugs with no fixes for more than two major releases, I would hope some serious alarm bells start ringing - either way, right now we don't automate such a process, so if it were happening would we even know? I suspect that core library list is far smaller than 68, but you're the expert here. Do you know how tightly integrated those 68 libraries are e.g. how many of them pull in a dependency only to never use it or use it very lightly? How many pull in dependencies which can now be replaced with C++11 standard libraries instead? That sort of thing. (P.S.: I don't expect you to know the precise answer to this, but I'm very sure you know much more than I do). Niall -- Currently unemployed and looking for work. Work Portfolio: http://careers.stackoverflow.com/nialldouglas/