John and Pete, I do appreciate your insights into the inner workings of the Boost community. I'm not discouraged about the lack of interest in my suggestion, but I was somewhat surprised. Boost libraries are one of those things that make life better for programming engineers. I believed that was the unwritten philosophy behind Boost, to "Make Life Better." Extending that philosophical notion, the Boost libraries would also know about the shortcomings of compilers and operating systems and help to improve their performance as well, simply because it "makes life better." I suppose I must have been mistaken about that... perhaps not everybody in the Boost community has feelings of magnanimity and charity. -Sid Sacek -----Original Message----- From: boost-bounces@lists.boost.org [mailto:boost-bounces@lists.boost.org] On Behalf Of John Phillips Sent: Tuesday, June 09, 2009 6:15 PM To: boost@lists.boost.org Subject: Re: [boost] "boost cold shoulder" (was proposal for #pragma oncesupport) Pete Bartlett wrote:
I brought this topic up a couple of months ago, and I got the "Boost Cold Shoulder".
You see, I believe the head-honchos here are GCC aficionados and don't care much about Bill Gate's compilers.
I hope you do better than I did.
-Sid Sacek
I'm not any sort of honcho here so I hope you don't mind if I disagree.
I'm going to disagree, as well. I just went back into the archives and looked at your thread, and I'm confused by your perception of a cold shoulder. I count 26 posts in the thread over less than 4 days, in a discussion that includes some library maintainers and one of the moderators. This a reasonably active discussion for around here. I agree that no one showed up and said "You have permission, go ahead and do it." However, as Pete points out, that just isn't the way Boost works. All broad action in Boost happens by first building a wide consensus in the community. If you notice, when moderators such as Dave or Beman have ideas for changes, they follow the same process of discussion on the list and building consensus. On some occasions they don't generate enough interest or agreement and their ideas go by the wayside. It isn't always quick, but it is the way Boost works. More broadly, please continue contributing. Not every idea you have will be what the community does, but getting your ideas in the mix is central to how we function. (For the record, some of my ideas have gone down in flames, or just produced no broad interest, so I know where of I speak.) John _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe & other changes: http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost