On 5/21/16 1:20 PM, M.A. van den Berg wrote:
How can we speed of the review process, make it more efficient?
Actually, there is facility to speed up the review process right now. It's the Boost Library Incubator. One can go there download or checkout the submission, try it on his machine. And fill out a form which corresponds to the Boost Review process. The library author - or anyone else is informed of this and can respond. All this can be done before there is any formal review announced. The Review is kept available indefinitely for other users and is considered by the Review Manage when the formal review is underway. In theory, there should be no bottle neck in the formal review process. there's even an automated 1-5 star rating for each library. In practice this doesn't happen as I had hoped. People don't evaluate the library and write a review. They wait until the review is announced then make their review. This is OK but not what I hoped. The true scarce resources and limit to the growth of boost are: a) The submission of libraries which fail to meet boost requirements. Note I said "requirements" not quality standards. By requirements, I mean having a boost file layout, tests, and documentation. Currently there are 32 submissions in the incubator. There are thousands of source code packages out there but only 32 in submitted for review. One reason is that even the low bar of the incubator is too high for most of the code that people think of as a library. And in spite of clearly spelled out requirements such the above, I still get submissions which say things like: See "headers for documentation". b) the number of reviews and reviewers. Typically there are only around 6 reviewers who participate in a formal review. This has been OK but I would like to see more. To take an extreme: Apple reviews millions of apps, the reject very quickly and have a likely a semi-automated and rational checklist that developers can self asses their submissions against. actually that's similar to the the incubator. We verify that it meets the stated objective requirements. This is a simple process which takes only a few minutes. the other part of the apple process is user reviews. The incubator doesn't perform this function - that is left to the formal review process and the reviewers. So if you want to speed up the process without breaking boost, volunteer as reviewer or review manager. Robert Ramey