Paul A. Bristow wrote:
If the maintainer appears missing (on holiday even), I'd favour quicker patching of bugs, after some discussion seeking agreement - or veto.
This would be a really bad idea in my opinion - for more than one reason. Very often, what users characterise as "bugs" are really one of the following: * error in user's code * misunderstanding of error / warning messages * result of choices made by the developers in the course of making tradeoffs between legimate optoins. * intentional features of the design which are not appreciated by the "fixer" In summary, many of the proposed "bug fixes" are not bugs but something else and the proponent doesn't understand this. almost all changes have or can have unexpected side effects in places totally unexpected by the naive maintainer. Most of the boost libraries address a huge number of issues "under the covers". (That's what libraries are for) Most of these fixes/patches are untested. The proponent thinks he's tested them because the "fix" made his program work. But that's in no way the same a running the test suite on all platformas and build variants. The above are good reasons for running changes through a maintainer. But the real reason is: The current system makes one person responsable for maintaining any given library and gives that person the autority required to accept that responsability. Once you give others the authority to mess with a library - the maintainer cannot be held responsable for it's state. Now that he's been handed an impossible task - he'll just move on. Result - no maintainer. Robert Ramey