Re: [boost] Option 1: Alliance stewardship of Boost

On Aug 6, 2024, at 7:33 AM, Niall Douglas via Boost wrote:

My memory is that Dave asked for the help of a select few in writing the tooling to do the conversion because the Boost community had proved singularly useless in taking a decision, and he was going to impose a decision as BDFL after a great deal of wailing and complaint about there being any change at all. He then rammed it through fairly unceremoniously giving people very little choice about it.

I'm sorry, I can't let this stand. It's basically slanderous. It should all be in the public record, regardless. I was never a BDFL, and was never in a position to impose a decision. I asked for help in writing tooling to do the conversion, it is true. Not because the community was unable to decide about anything (tooling can't possibly help with that), but because the problem was hard. The problem was hard because there was a great insistence at the beginning on meaningful preservation of all branch history in SVN (in the end, after all that work, IIRC many people wanted to delete the old branches!) At some point we announced https://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost/2013/05/203367.php that the conversion was ready for review, by which we meant we were collecting feedback on the results. That lasted a couple months and when the kinks were worked out Beman started a thread https://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost/2013/10/207803.php to discuss a switchover schedule. It was all done by consensus.