-----Original Message----- From: boost-bounces@lists.boost.org [mailto:boost-bounces@lists.boost.org] On Behalf Of boost-request@lists.boost.org Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2008 5:42 PM To: boost@lists.boost.org Subject: Boost Digest, Vol 2373, Issue 4
Yes, this is an unfortunate situation. If you indeed want to try to make sure this kind of silent breakage doesn't happen again, there's something you can do about it: write a page of library maintenance guidelines on the wiki at http://svn.boost.org. We are sorely missing a policy on this, and when less-experienced library authors come along, they often don't hew to the same standards that many of us take for granted. If you don't have write permission for the wiki, please let us know and we'll send you an invitation.
Hello Dave, This is a good answer but not the one I was looking for. It's a politician's answer, in that it doesn't really answer my original query. Let me just put a few of my thoughts here: What was described in my original email are bad practices in any project, not just boost. Given that the boost developers are presented frequently as "the best", it isn't unreasonable to expect that they would understand that causing silent breakage (and the other points I made) is bad. It takes a lot of work for a library to get accepted and the library has to meet very high standards. However, it seems that once a library is accepted, the maintainer is pretty much free to do what they please. I think it may be wise to apply the same level of rigour to the continued development. Do you think that a boost library that was broken should be rolled back? About the wiki: The desire to solve this problem has to come from within, not from without. Given how big some of the personalities are on this mailing list, do you think it's likely they would listen to someone who has not contributed a complete library to boost? Finally, I'd like to mention that within a large organisation, it's not possible to upgrade to the latest version of boost as soon as it comes out. The difficulty of rebuilding all of the internal systems just makes this impractical. As you are aware, a lot of people avoid the .0 releases. What does this say to you? I understand (and applaud) boost's efforts to try to to eliminate this notion with tighter release cycles etc but the problem is that it's much harder to lose people's confidence than to regain it. I like using boost and am very grateful to all the developers who make it happen. Having said that, SNAFUs such as the current Boost.Range or the MT problem with Boost.Function in 1.34 threaten to make it irrelevant in "serious" development and relegate it to the position of a great "toy library" you can see how C++ standard compliant your compiler is. Kind regards, Tom