On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 8:49 AM, Paul A. Bristow
I'm not an expert on the subject, but I think you are right to be cautious about trying to be everything to all men. ... I think you should propose what you have now for formal review.
I appreciate the kind words and support for a formal review. I have carefully studied all of the review comments provided during the review of Boost.Http in 2015. In particular, a comment from Robert Ramey: from http://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost/2015/08/224700.php "To me it's very unfortunate that so much effort has had to be expended by a library author to produce a library that is not accepted. It's also unfortunate that so many reviewers need to spend this much time to dig up enough information to reach this consensus. This illustrates my motivation behind the design of the boost library incubator." I think the idea behind the incubator is sound, and I agree with Robert's assessment. Looking over the formal review comments for Boost.Http, about half of the reviewers admitted they did not have enough time to do a deeper dive. I would like to avoid these mistakes. My approach is to get a higher awareness of Beast through discussions on this mailing list, and through face to face meetings with stakeholders and reviewers (for example at CppCon 2016, and C++ Now 2017). In the meanwhile, the number of users continues to grow. The odds of success during a formal review can only go up by collecting and addressing feedback from stakeholders before the review begins. These are the set of individuals who participated in the 2015 review of Boost.Http: Agustin K-ballo Berge Antony Polukhin Bjorn Reese Darren Cook David Sankel Edward Diener Glen Fernandes Lee Clagett Niall Douglas Robert Ramey Rodrigo Madera Roland Bock Tom Kent Vinicius Oliveira Vladimir Prus I would like to hear from as many of these individuals as possible, about their experience looking at Beast and taking it for a test drive, before starting the formal review process. Of special importance is to get feedback from Vinicius Oliveira, the author of Boost.Http. We spent several hours talking about our respective libraries with each other. Beast provides the lowest level interfaces, while Boost.Http tries to offer the higher level functionality that was recently requested. Specifically, Boost.Http attempts to provide a turn-key server solution. I've heard that Vinicius is busy working on a client, and has also implemented his own parser. I think public feedback on Beast from the author of Boost.Http is crucial, since Beast claims to offer uncontroversial low level functionality which Boost.Http would have to use if Beast is accepted to Boost. Perplexingly, I have seen no evidence of any public dialogue from Vinicius about his current client interface goals, or any plan to refactor Boost.Http to use Beast. I'd like to hear his reasoning for why a HTTP library needs to "support multiple backends" (what does that mean?), a theme which came up often in his responses to review feedback. Is this a feature that serves the needs of users? Thanks