Michael Fawcett wrote:
On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 5:15 PM, Gennaro Prota <gennaro.prota@yahoo.com> wrote:
Because there's already enough nonsense to show off on the site's corners? :-)
Do you mean Coverity's or Boost's site?
Boost ("most expertly designed in the world", etc.)
I'm not familiar with Coverity at all.
First time I hear of it, too :-) From a quick (as in "uninterested") glance at their site, they seem yet another "provider of nothing" trying to make a name for itself (and go from there to make money). It may well be that adding a "Coverity certified" or anything like that to the Boost home page will convince more people to "buy"; it's likely in fact (I hate to say it, but a lot of the people who gravitate around OSS are amateurs, and are easily excited). Personally, I still dream of a world were software quality is quality, not labels or marks. FWIW, nobody in Boost does anything about unnamed namespaces in include files, for instance. In fact, nobody looks at the inspection report (it would have been the quickest way to notice the new CMake files :-)). Most (all?) of Boost relies on Boost Testing, which is one of the most complex sub-libraries, and one where I've seen some of the worst engineering practices applied. The "new" lexical_cast is a close friend, and there are simply authors who don't know where the house of simplicity is (looking at the source code of one of the tools I found boost::tuple used --which in turn meant type_traits, which in turn meant mpl, lambda and God knows what-- when std::pair would just do). I could continue for hours, really (but please don't ask). At the end of the day, nobody is going to complain to anyone, because everything is "volunteer contribution". That may be humanly understandable, but don't expect to have quality in this kind of ecosystem ("patches are welcome", "if you notice anything wrong you can fix it" are easy escapes: you don't produce solid software by trial and error, nor you can really fight the mentality of an overwhelming majority). If you like, you can put it this way: Boost is no better than Wikipedia. I find Wikipedia useful, but I also find errors (or completely insane entries) every time I read it. -- Genny