Janek Kozicki wrote:
Robert Ramey said: (by the date of Wed, 25 Oct 2006 12:52:48 -0700)
I would suggest zipping up your whole package - code changes, new tests, documentation etc and uploading it to the "vault".
This will let other users who might find it useful add into their code/projects and permit you to get some feed back.
whooops ;) Not what I did. Robert did you get my 07-tree_archive.tar.gz ? Should I upload it to vault?
In this instance you got lucky. I just happened to be working on something very similar to what you had in mind. Great minds work alike. So I handed my version to you - which you finished and handed back to me. Which I haven't yet handed back to you yet. Also note that our "GUI serialization editor" extension consists of a new archive rather than alteration of the library itself so we know for a fact that it can never break anything that currently works. Of course that makes it easier to deal with. So this would be an unusual case. More typically what happens I get some half-baked idea for a new feature or change that someone thinks it would be a good idea for me to implement in the library. I don't mean to use the term "half-baked" in a perjorative way. Its just that there its a longer road than it first appears to get from some great idea to something that can be fit into boost. Working code is the starting point - not the end point.
But unfortunately I don't think I will currently find time to prepare tests for that, and other required stuff. Probably later this year.
And I think a lot of programmers miss out on the opportunity to have their stuff a lot more widely used. If you want your fair share of programmer immortality you have to commit yourself to building a complete package ready for someone else to use. Now I think our "GUI serialization editor" might inspire a lot of interest among current users of the serialization library. But since these users have other stuff to do (That's why they're using our library in the first place!!!). It has to be very easy and fast (20 min max) to learn how to use. And that means a good documenation and example. On the other hand, if getting your fair share of immortality isn't important - what are we doing? Coding for its own sake? I realise that coding is the "fun" part. But as one gets older, "fun" isn't enough - you need to know that your work has some real value. So in my view its not done until the customer buys it and the 30 day money back guarentee expires. Of course we don't sell Boost libraries (maybe we should) so we don't get that kind of feedback. But we do get some idea that it meets users expections from the mailing list. I guess that'll have to do. Robert Ramey