On Mon, Apr 4, 2022 at 12:05 PM William Linkmeyer wrote:

It would be fitting, I think, to use boost-based projects for the website’s back-end I’m currently working on a boost::beast-based server. It hosts my website, but that’s not exactly mass-tested.

While I am flattered, trying to use Boost.Beast and C++ to build a modern website may not be the most efficient. That's a lot of new code which few people will understand. I haven't deployed any servers recently, but I suspect that the economical and pragmatic solution is to use off-the-shelf software parts that are widely understood and for which it is easy to find reasonably skilled maintainers.

I am curious in re. the thought that Boost is on a decline. If the point of comparison is high-impact library creation and adoption, then yes, maybe boost is on a decline. But, aren’t there only so many fundamental libraries to create — and doesn’t boost cover virtually all of those fundamental libraries?

Human creativity is essentially infinite, and software is infinitely frustrating, so I think that we will not be covering all the potentially useful libraries any time soon, if ever :) You do raise a good question, how do we measure the success of Boost? Is it the number of installs? The number of programs using Boost? The amount of participation on the lists? I think software development is an inherently social phenomenon. It is the vibrant exchange of knowledge and ideas that drives the state-of-the-art forward. Thanks

If boost were able to take this concept: https://ossia.io/posts/minimum-viable/ And drive it further, we may be able to place roots in graphics for later expansion. I anticipate further community involvement after the above idea is refined. It’s a great launch-point into a system-agnostic [ui/wm/graphics] framework. Google’s flutter and filament come to mind as the kinds of projects that would be possible for Boost after this — a minimum viable declarative graphics library (which I’ll call “DGL” for brevity) — is in place. The potential applications are quite broad. Building on Beast, DGL could also be served to clients on the web and declare user interfaces users there. WL

On Apr 4, 2022, at 4:28 PM, Richard Hodges via Boost wrote:

On Mon, 4 Apr 2022 at 21:11, William Linkmeyer via Boost < boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:

...

I’m more than happy to rewrite parts of the Boost website with, perhaps, bootstrap and mustaches.

It would be fitting, I think, to use boost-based projects for the website’s back-end I’m currently working on a boost::beast-based server. It hosts my website, but that’s not exactly mass-tested.

I am curious in re. the thought that Boost is on a decline. If the point of comparison is high-impact library creation and adoption, then yes, maybe boost is on a decline. But, aren’t there only so many fundamental libraries to create — and doesn’t boost cover virtually all of those fundamental libraries?

There might be room to pivot in the direction of more user-facing utilities. Things like graphics clients, window managers, or audio I/O come to mind.

I favour this. Boost is great for supplying nuts and bolts, but it's light on turnkey application frameworks.

...

There may also be room to pivot in the opposite direction: embedded utilities. Things such as GPIO, SPI, and I2C come to mind as easy candidates for such a library. The state of that landscape is a bit scattered right now. On one hand, the Linux kernel gives the programmer robust support for such connections — but because all of the support is file-based, programmers generally pick a library with less overhead. That library used to be wiringpi, which has since gone dark.

Developers may find such projects attractive. If my experience is any indication of how other programmers think, I’ll put it out there: the existing boost libraries are either too well-written (beast), too large, or too domain-specific (math libraries) for me to contribute anything of substance.

WL

...

On Apr 4, 2022, at 1:43 PM, Vinnie Falco via Boost < boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:

Well, now that I have everyone's attention just before the release, I'd like to draw attention to the elephant in the room. That is, the declining level of activity on the Boost mailing lists and the declining level of participation in the Boost formal review process. Both in terms of the number of reviewers, and in terms of the difficulty in finding a review manager.

Clearly, a website update is necessary and along with it some type of campaign to highlight once again the important role that Boost serves in the C++ community for both professionals and amateurs alike. But what more can we do?

This came up before but it is worth mentioning again; in addition to a website update to make boost.org modern and relevant, how do we feel about a transition to forum-based discussion instead of the mailing list? I realize this will ruffle some feathers but surely the alternative, a descent into irrelevance due to steady declining activity is worse?

Discuss.

-- Regards, Vinnie

Follow me on GitHub: https://github.com/vinniefalco

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On Tue, 5 Apr 2022 at 16:45, Bjorn Reese via Boost wrote:

On 4/5/22 14:39, Phil Endecott via Boost wrote:

...

I think the question we need to ask first is "where have the participants gone?". Preferably quantified.

Another place is reddit. There are reddit posts about Boost that also ought to have been posted here.

This is a good point - it is now the norm for social media management to be an important part of any web presence.

Off the top of my head:

https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/t8wlqs/development_plan_for_boostunord...

https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/k58a2u/beman_dawes_has_passed_away_boo...

https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/giu6xg/proposal_for_an_epochbased_orga...

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On 14/04/2022 07:59, Vinnie Falco wrote:

On Wed, Apr 13, 2022 at 12:27 PM 😉 Good Guy 😉 wrote:

...

How about creating a free newsgroups on alt.* or free.*

Newsgroups are still around?

I still read this list via the gmane newsgroup :P If you want to do that too, it's gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel on news.gmane.io.

On 14/04/2022 11:50, William Linkmeyer wrote:

This feels like one step forward, two steps sideways.

I’m going to put a +1 out for Fossil-scm and a +1 out for GitHub discussions.

I’m in favor of simplifying the pipelines. Make it *obvious* where things are.

Well, to me it's obvious: things are here. Either as an email list or as a newsgroup; each user can decide for themselves and they're fully interchangeable. I've never used Slack or Reddit or whatever else. GitHub comments are fine, but they should be focused on a specific issue or PR, not for more general discussion.

On Thu, Apr 14, 2022 at 9:12 AM Robert Ramey via Boost wrote:

+1 for news groups. Slack is a poor substitute.

Slack doesn't replace news groups it replaces IRC. Thanks

On Apr 5, 2022, at 5:07 PM, René Ferdinand Rivera Morell wrote:

On Tue, Apr 5, 2022, 6:41 PM Marshall Clow via Boost mailto:boost@lists.boost.org> wrote: On Apr 4, 2022, at 10:43 AM, Vinnie Falco via Boost mailto:boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:

...

This came up before but it is worth mentioning again; in addition to a website update to make boost.org http://boost.org/ <http://boost.org/ http://boost.org/> modern and relevant, how do we feel about a transition to forum-based discussion instead of the mailing list?

Strongly opposed.

The beauty of email is that

* the discussion *comes to me*; that I don’t have to go and check some website to see if there are new posts. * I have a local archive of the boost mailing lists going back to (checks…) 2009 at my fingertips. Pre-2009 requires a bit more work. * I can read (and search, and reply) with tools of my choice.

If you know of a forum-based discussion that offers those benefits, I’d love to hear about it.

https://www.discourse.org/ https://www.discourse.org/

I forgot the most important thing about email. * It doesn’t interrupt me when “new stuff is available”; I can look at it when I want. I looked at Discourse a year ago, and hated it. I didn’t see any information about alternate clients, workflows etc a year ago, so I’ll take a look again, but the my take on the default experience was “like Slack, but with cheesier graphics and more sounds, animations, and interruptions”. — Marshall

On 4/6/22 03:54, Marshall Clow via Boost wrote:

On Apr 5, 2022, at 5:07 PM, René Ferdinand Rivera Morell wrote:

...

On Tue, Apr 5, 2022, 6:41 PM Marshall Clow via Boost mailto:boost@lists.boost.org> wrote: On Apr 4, 2022, at 10:43 AM, Vinnie Falco via Boost mailto:boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:

...

This came up before but it is worth mentioning again; in addition to a website update to make boost.org http://boost.org/ <http://boost.org/ http://boost.org/> modern and relevant, how do we feel about a transition to forum-based discussion instead of the mailing list?

Strongly opposed.

The beauty of email is that

* the discussion *comes to me*; that I don’t have to go and check some website to see if there are new posts. * I have a local archive of the boost mailing lists going back to (checks…) 2009 at my fingertips. Pre-2009 requires a bit more work. * I can read (and search, and reply) with tools of my choice.

If you know of a forum-based discussion that offers those benefits, I’d love to hear about it.

https://www.discourse.org/ https://www.discourse.org/

I forgot the most important thing about email.

* It doesn’t interrupt me when “new stuff is available”; I can look at it when I want.

I looked at Discourse a year ago, and hated it.

I didn’t see any information about alternate clients, workflows etc a year ago, so I’ll take a look again, but the my take on the default experience was “like Slack, but with cheesier graphics and more sounds, animations, and interruptions”.

I'd like to add another point of consideration. Any centralized service may enact access restrictions based on user's region or other criteria. This is not specifically about Discourse as I don't know if they are practicing this. I know Slack does. Also, web-based forums are more susceptible to user's government access restrictions. Spam, discussions on sensitive or illegal in certain jurisdictions topics and malicious comments stay available online, unless actively moderated, and may be grounds for penalties and access restrictions. Gladly, so far I haven't heard of restrictions applied to email exchange.

On Wed, Apr 6, 2022 at 10:44 AM Niall Douglas via Boost
 wrote:
> On 06/04/2022 01:54, Marshall Clow via Boost wrote:
> >> https://www.discourse.org/ 
> > * It doesn’t interrupt me when “new stuff is available”; I can look  at it when I want.
> > I looked at Discourse a year ago, and hated it.
> Discourse is absolutely awful.

I'd quickly mention (again?) the [Fossil-SCM-based forum][1] used for
both SQLite and Fossil itself.

Dr Richard Hipp, of SQLite fame, was fed up with fighting spam on the
ML, and decided to take
matters into his own capable hands, as he often does, and created his
own forum software, on top of his
own SCM software (Fossil), itself on top of SQLite, itself built on
Lemon, Richard's own Yacc replacement.
(he almost implemented his own SMTP, and started it in fact, but for
now uses the system one AFAIK).
Oh, and the [Web server is also based on his own of course][3].

As a long time SQLite ML member, I was strongly against it, especially
the anonymous posting,
but turns out to be a non-issue, since I can still read messages in
plain readable text in my mail client,
while replying must be done in the low-key minimal and fast web-app; I
actually even enjoy the ability to format
things in markup (markdown or fossil varieties), and even have
diagrams described in PIC format (i.e. plain text, see [2]).

As usual for My Hipp's productions, it's high quality, small, OSS, in
plain C (and TH, a TCL subset, for templating),
very fast and low resources (so cheap to host). And contrary to
SQLite, external contributions are possible, with
a larger set of committers, beside Richard who remains the main author
and shepherd for the project.

These are not commercial projects, Richard has nothing to sell you
(beside support contract on SQLite if you want).
These tools are first and foremost for Richard himself and SQLite, but
happen to be generally useful and mature IMHO.

I've used Discord and Basecamp, and don't hate them, but Fossil forums
are so lightweight, fast, and low-key,
that it's basically the antithesis of these JS-heavy Flashy "modern"
forum software, and I prefer Fossil now.

And there's no Fossil Forum "app" for phones or tablets. But the site
aims to be "responsive" enough to be useable.
And again, you also need to use the web-app for posting, not reading.

Anyways, I thought I'd be remise not to mention all the above. Even
though I doubt Boost would adopt a Fossil forum.

FWIW, --DD

[1]: https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/forum.wiki
[2]: https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/pikchr.md
[3]: https://sqlite.org/althttpd/doc/trunk/althttpd.md

On Wed, Apr 6, 2022 at 2:15 PM Niall Douglas via Boost wrote:

On 06/04/2022 12:42, Dominique Devienne wrote:

...

I'd quickly mention [Fossil-SCM-based forum]

I don't want lots of stuff in one overarching solution. I want one thing solved well, and I want it to plug nicely into the most popular tooling. Which is git for SCM and github for issue tracking.

Well, when that overarching solution weighs less than most Boost libraries :) Some people are using Fossil solely for the forum. Ignore the rest. Heck, you could even subset the code needed, if you wanted. The ML is not integrated with Git or GitHub, yet works fine. Think of it that way.

So that's a big turnoff for me at least, it reminds me of that all-in-one integrated thingy which Boost had yonks ago and we were never able to get off some very ancient version of it full of known security holes. I **really** don't want to go back to that.

It's actually because Mr Hipp cares a lot about security that he controls the whole stack... I can guarantee you, from having witnessed it, that he's very reactive to any report about issues. And if you actually look into the sources of althttpd, you'd see clearly stated the code is kept simple on purpose, to make it auditable from A to Z in a single sitting of a couple hours. All requests are handled in a forked child on purpose (works best/fastest on Linux for that reason), with the whole thing running in a chroot jail by default. I.e. the attack surface is kept small on purpose. I'm sure it could further be secured in a container or nanovm or whatever the Cloud'y people will invent next. Again, I doubt Fossil will gain traction here. And I'm just a (happy) user of it, I have no skin in this game. But please don't go about writing about security holes or abondonware or bloat for things Dr Hipp does...

On Wed, Apr 6, 2022 at 4:13 PM Niall Douglas via Boost wrote:

On 06/04/2022 13:58, Dominique Devienne wrote:

...

...

So that's a big turnoff for me at least, it reminds me of that all-in-one integrated thingy which Boost had yonks ago and we were never able to get off some very ancient version of it full of known security holes. I **really** don't want to go back to that. But please don't go about writing about security holes or abondonware or bloat for things Dr Hipp does...

The issue [...] which Boost had [...] wasn't that there weren't new versions. [...] The issue was that upgrading the existing to newer broke stuff [...]

Good thing Fossil and SQLite have a excellent track record of backward compatibility then.

[...] learned to love GitHub. [...]

But that's orthogonal, no? GitHub does not have MLs or a Boost-wide forum, does it? I don't have experience with GitHub discussions, but I do subscribe to lots of GitHub projects and some issues, getting email notifications from them, but this doesn't feel like a forum or an ML to me. But perhaps I'm missing your point and what you are actually advocating for, as a replacement for the current MLs? In the GitHub ecosystem perhaps? --DD PS: Another anecdote regarding "security" and Fossil. When SHA1 was "broken", Dr Hipp switched Fossil to SHA3 in a matter of days, retaining BC with former artifacts using SHA1, while it took months (or is it years?) for Git to upgrade its hashes. But that's about Fossil *SCM*, while here we are merely discussing Fossil for its Forum feature (yet, Forum posts are SCM artifacts in and of themselves I believe, although I'm not sure of that. They are editable and versioned for sure).

On 6/04/2022 20:44, Niall Douglas wrote:

Something tolerable - currently before they ruin it - is Reddit. I particularly like that search engines index it well, and given the useless rubbish Google nowadays returns for a query, I often wish for a Google which exclusively searches Reddit and returns no other results.

Just add 'site:reddit.com' to your search queries. Although I think that can still return off-site ads, depending on your search terms.

On Wed, 6 Apr 2022 at 03:29, Matt Borland via Boost wrote:

3) Vinnie posed the questions how do we get more people involved as review managers? I will ask in return how does one get involved as a review manager?

As per https://www.boost.org/community/reviews.html#Review_Manager First, "an active boost member not connected with the library submission must volunteer to be the "Review Manager" for the library." Then, "The library author has to accept a person as a review manager." Finally, the Wizards "Approve the review manager based on initial acceptance by the library submitter, their participation in the Boost community, including the mailing list, previous reviews, and other forums."

The webpage describing the process seemed a bit nebulous to me, and I am likely not alone in thinking this.

The description is pretty complete - I'd risk statement it's one of the best documented Boost-wide processes out there :) Still, I agree, there is room for improvements, e.g. it could explain the process in a cooking recipe-like or algorithmic fashion :) Best regards, -- Mateusz Loskot, http://mateusz.loskot.net

On Wed, Apr 6, 2022 at 2:39 AM Andrea Bocci wrote:

On Wed, 6 Apr 2022 at 02:08, René Ferdinand Rivera Morell via Boost < boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:

...

https://www.discourse.org/

Please, do not joke about it :-(

We "decided" to switch from an old mailing list software to Discourse in house, and after few weeks of use it seems clear that Discourse is making all the wrong choices regarding "mailing list mode": - it alters the body of the message adding "fancy" images (with tracking links) - it puts the recipient as the sole address in the "to" field, making it harder to filter emails based on the recipient list - it uses a different reply-to email address for each "thread", making it hard to filter emails based on that, too - it does not provide simple email addresses to start new threads - it does not keep the sender in cc or any other header, preventing one from writing to the sender

If you were to seriously considering it, the LLVM people seem to be intent in switching to it, and I would suggest to wait and see how that plays out :-/

Thank you for that. Others have suggested Discourse, like for WG21, but I've never gotten to experience it. I wasn't a fan of the web UX style at first glance. And combined with your assessment cements my opinion against it :-) -- -- René Ferdinand Rivera Morell -- Don't Assume Anything -- No Supone Nada -- Robot Dreams - http://robot-dreams.net

On Tue, Apr 5, 2022 at 4:41 PM Marshall Clow via Boost < boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:

On Apr 4, 2022, at 10:43 AM, Vinnie Falco via Boost wrote:

...

This came up before but it is worth mentioning again; in addition to a website update to make boost.org http://boost.org/ modern and

relevant, how do we feel

...

about a transition to forum-based discussion instead of the mailing list?

Strongly opposed.

Also strongly opposed. I am now the maintainer of Boost for Fedora/CentOS/RHEL (Jonathan is transition out of the role). If Boost discussion moves to some forum that I have to chase down vs. just arriving alongside the rest of my upstreams (e.g. libstdc++) it's likely to get missed, so the quality of Fedora's distribution of Boost will likely suffer. The beauty of email is that

* the discussion *comes to me*; that I don’t have to go and check some website to see if there are new posts. * I have a local archive of the boost mailing lists going back to (checks…) 2009 at my fingertips. Pre-2009 requires a bit more work. * I can read (and search, and reply) with tools of my choice.

If you know of a forum-based discussion that offers those benefits, I’d love to hear about it.

— Marshall

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Niall Douglas wrote:

- Non-per-library discussion tends to happen increasingly on Reddit /r/cpp.

I don't think it does.

On Wed, Apr 6, 2022 at 10:31 AM Thomas Rodgers via Boost wrote:

Well, my willingness to chase ships is limited...GitHub is the least bad alternative for my purposes, IMO.

I agree that you should not have to "chase ships." If Boost moves to a discussion forum I think it only makes sense that mailing list functionality is preserved, even if only for a handful of users. Especially if those users have an outsized impact on Boost (such as being a packager or distribution maintainer). Thanks

On 07/04/2022 09:37, Andrey Semashev via Boost wrote:

On 4/7/22 09:54, Kostas Savvidis via Boost wrote:

...

...

On Apr 4, 2022, at 20:43, Vinnie Falco via Boost

wrote:

...

...

the declining level of activity on the Boost mailing lists and the declining level of participation in the Boost formal review process. Both in terms of the number of reviewers, and in terms of the difficulty in finding a review manager.

One way forward might be involving more women. Now and again, a woman posts a patch or a comment but the core participants are all men. The Foundation's board is also all male. Google Code also seems to attract an all-male crowd.

Women, in particular, are excellent at active networking and will in time involve yet other women (and men).

How to do it? Next time there is a review, cold-call a colleague or a mailing list participant.

Gender has no bearing in Boost community, and I would very much like it to stay this way. If you're good at C++, if you have interesting ideas, if you make useful libraries - you are welcome, regardless of gender, race or nationality.

There seems to be about a 5-10% stable population proportion of women over time, very similar proportion to Physics. Many years ago - maybe ten now? - I did an informal survey at a conference of what puts women off a career in C++. What I say next is as reliable as that would mean, plus with a decade of memory corruption. It's not the technical complexity - actually, that was rated usually as a positive. It's not toxic masculinity - a few mentioned the C++ male dominated ecosystem is marginally better than wider society. It's not outright discrimination, it was mentioned a few misoygnists exist anywhere you go, and C++ was neither better nor worse in that regard than elsewhere. However there was a perception of there being a glass ceiling in terms of promotion into technical specialisation, and much less so into managerial specialisation. Many commented that they were sure they didn't get pay rises anything like as much as men, and that was offputting. From what I gathered at the time, the overwhelming feedback was that it the lack of flexibility shown by employers that put women off. C++ employers want people for at least 40 hours per week. They are usually flexible about when, but not about how much. I heard several horror stories of employer mistreatment and intransigence, admittedly they were all US based, I can't imagine any of that being legal in the EU. I'm sympathetic to that observation. Yesterday morning I had a sick one year old to look after while my wife slept. You don't get much high quality C++ written when there is a one year old actively trying to choke themselves, pull things down onto themselves, and trying to push the power button on your computer. I wasn't able to say "my child is sick, there is nobody else to look after them, so I need to take half a day at very short notice". Even in the EU, there is no legal obligation on employers to provide that right, and the EU is probably the most worker friendly large region anywhere in the world. Re: Foundation/Conferences/WG21 I can absolutely assure you that every effort is made to ensure as diverse a board membership as possible, but there are very few women to choose from, and when asked to serve many say they can't commit the time (which is the case for most approached whether male or female). So if a board ends up all male, it's because there wasn't much alternative. I know for a fact that that lack of diversity bothers everybody involved. In any case, I agree with Andrey, I don't want to know anything about a C++ contributor other than the C++ they have to show me. I also think that if employers were actually serious about improving diversity, they could easily do so, but continue to proactively choose to keep the current situation the way it is. We in open source have very little power over the economics here because we don't have the power to hire and fire, and we have no control over the money. We are takers here, not setters. All that said, god speed on improving the situation. Niall

On Thu, 7 Apr 2022 at 10:37, Andrey Semashev via Boost wrote:

On 4/7/22 09:54, Kostas Savvidis via Boost wrote:

...

...

On Apr 4, 2022, at 20:43, Vinnie Falco via Boost wrote:

the declining level of activity on the Boost mailing lists and the declining level of participation in the Boost formal review process. Both in terms of the number of reviewers, and in terms of the difficulty in finding a review manager.

One way forward might be involving more women. Now and again, a woman posts a patch or a comment but the core participants are all men. The Foundation's board is also all male. Google Code also seems to attract an all-male crowd.

Women, in particular, are excellent at active networking and will in time involve yet other women (and men).

How to do it? Next time there is a review, cold-call a colleague or a mailing list participant.

Gender has no bearing in Boost community, and I would very much like it to stay this way. If you're good at C++, if you have interesting ideas, if you make useful libraries - you are welcome, regardless of gender, race or nationality.

+1 I couldn't express my own thoughts on that matter better. Best regards, -- Mateusz Loskot, http://mateusz.loskot.net

On Thu, 7 Apr 2022 at 14:16, Dominique Devienne wrote:

On Thu, Apr 7, 2022 at 1:41 PM Mateusz Loskot via Boost wrote:

...

On Thu, 7 Apr 2022 at 10:37, Andrey Semashev via Boost

...

Gender has no bearing in Boost community

+1 I couldn't express my own thoughts on that matter better.

If gender was such a non-issue, then we wouldn't have [affirmative action][1] (in general) or [gender-quotas-by-law][2] in our societies.

Perhaps other organisations experienced issues, so they take actions as they see it appropriate. I do not need to be presented with rules of ethics written down, - no one needs it in here, I'm certain - in order to behave ethically and professionally. Best regards, -- Mateusz Loskot, http://mateusz.loskot.net

Hi, On Thu, 7 Apr 2022 at 14:16, Dominique Devienne via Boost wrote:

On Thu, Apr 7, 2022 at 1:41 PM Mateusz Loskot via Boost wrote:

If gender was such a non-issue, then we wouldn't have [affirmative action][1] (in general) or [gender-quotas-by-law][2] in our societies. Doing nothing, or saying there's no issue, is basically been "totally fine" with the "status quo". That's OT and I have no clue how such things apply to volunteer-based organizations like Boost, but lets be honest, the status quo rarely changes w/o being "challenged" a little, often my law. --DD

[1] https://conseilsdejournalistes.com/en/egalite-genre/13-quest-ce-que-la-discr... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/avivahwittenbergcox/2021/05/15/france-unanimous...

I am very skeptical any of this applies to online discussions. How can an online male be intimidating to a woman? I suppose physical presence would be a prerequisite for that. I don't even know the gender of some names I see popping up here. Marcelo

Respectfully, this seems to be getting slightly off-topic. I enjoyed the discussions about the benefits of Fossil-scm. Although, I think (or hope) that we can all agree that there could be efforts to make most any open-source community be more welcoming. Two cents, WL

On Apr 7, 2022, at 9:18 AM, Adam Wulkiewicz via Boost wrote:

W dniu 07.04.2022 o 14:19, Dominique Devienne via Boost pisze:

...

...

On Thu, Apr 7, 2022 at 1:41 PM Mateusz Loskot via Boost wrote: On Thu, 7 Apr 2022 at 10:37, Andrey Semashev via Boost

...

Gender has no bearing in Boost community +1 I couldn't express my own thoughts on that matter better. If gender was such a non-issue, then we wouldn't have [affirmative action][1] (in general) or [gender-quotas-by-law][2] in our societies. Doing nothing, or saying there's no issue, is basically been "totally fine" with the "status quo". That's OT and I have no clue how such things apply to volunteer-based organizations like Boost, but lets be honest, the status quo rarely changes w/o being "challenged" a little, often my law. --DD

[1] https://conseilsdejournalistes.com/en/egalite-genre/13-quest-ce-que-la-discr... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/avivahwittenbergcox/2021/05/15/france-unanimous... The fact that some organization or a government wants to follow some value system (religion or ideology) doesn't mean that others have to do this as well and that the outcome would be positive in the long term. What is being asked here is to abandon merit as the most important value and instead to focus on equality of outcome based on immutable characteristics instead. So I propose to stop with the nice words about "challenging" and talk about what's really happening here.

Regards, Adam

P.S. The parliament (unanimously) mandating something is the status quo. Politics is downstream from culture, not the other way around.

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W dniu 07.04.2022 o 15:32, Mateusz Loskot via Boost pisze:

...

Although, I think (or hope) that we can all agree that there could be efforts to make most any open-source community be more welcoming. Yes, let's identify and eliminate technical barriers and chores

On Thu, 7 Apr 2022 at 15:29, William Linkmeyer via Boost wrote: that work against growing participation by users and contributors. +1

Adam

Hello, I’d like to resurface this thread. There’s a lot of potential here. Alan’s synthesis is clear and actionable. It seems to me that the least controversial improvement we can make is this:

- Pivot in the direction of more user-facing utilities

- +1 Graphics clients, window managers, audio I/O

- +1 Boost is great for supplying nuts and bolts, but it's light on turnkey application frameworks

WL

On Apr 7, 2022, at 2:40 PM, Alan de Freitas via Boost wrote:

Hi,

I've attempted to synthesize this discussion so we might find holes in our divergencies or come up with something more actionable.

- This list does not represent my opinions. I marked things mentioned as pros and cons with +1/-1. This is also how I interpreted the comments and not my opinion. - As with any synthesis, there is going to be some error. I'm sorry if I misrepresented some opinions by mistake. - Solutions are not exclusive and not exhaustive.

## Communication

Problems mentioned:

- Declining activity in the mailing list

- Balkanization of Boost

Proposed solutions:

- Mailing list

- +1 The medium is not necessarily the problem

- -1 Declining activity already

- -1 Discussions about libraries are already on Github

- -1 Instant discussions are already on Slack

- -1 _Some_ non-per-library discussions are already on Reddit

- -1 Feels link 20-years ago tech

- +1 Discussion comes to the subscribers

- +1 Simplifies local archives and one can use tools of choice

- -1 Inability to have nicely formatted code

- -1 Inability to have embedded godbolt preview

- +1 It doesn’t interrupt you when “new stuff is available”

- Forum based solution

- +1 Friendlier from the user perspective

- +1 Allows one to subscribe to topics of interest

- +1 Discussion also comes to the subscribers

- -1 Some find forums inferior to mailing lists

- -1 Not everything can be solved by new and shiny tools

- -1 People have already moved discussions to Github

- +1 Newcomers prefer the web

- -1 People need to subscribe to topics

- -1 Integration with email involves lots of important details

- -1 Centralized services might limit access based on the user's region

- -1 Forums might require javascript to load content

- Some form of social media management

Related points

- Getting reviews pumping should incentivize communication

## Promotion

Problems mentioned:

- Necessity to highlight once again the important role that Boost serves in the C++ community

- Newcomers can't figure out where to ask for help and report problems.

- Newcomers find it easier to find support on Reddit, Gitter, Github, or slack, than on the mailing list.

Proposed solutions:

- Website

- +1 Make boost.org more modern and relevant

- -1 Not everything can be solved by new and shiny tools

- -1 Not many people decide not to use Boost because of the website

- +1 Could simplify involvement for newcomers

- Use boost projects for website backend

- -1 May not be the most efficient

- -1 Off-the-shelf software parts are widely understood

- Some type of campaign

- Identify metrics of success

- Number of installs

- Number of programs using Boost

- Participation

- Quantify where the participants have gone

- People go to std:: mailing lists with their ideas and bypass boost

- People go to Github, have their ideas available, bypass the review, and avoid changing things.

## Contributions and Proposals

Problems mentioned:

- No high-impact library creation and adoption

- High barrier to getting involved

- Libraries are either too well-written (beast) to contribute

- Libraries are too domain-specific (math libraries) to contribute

- There is no clear flow to do small improvements

- Contributors don't know what libs are dead and which are not

- Contributors don't know what are good issues for casual participants

- Unmaintained libraries and PRs that get ignored

- Contributors' lack of time

- You are not going to attract new people by making them use ancient standards

- Not enough women

Proposed solutions:

- Pivot in the direction of more user-facing utilities

- +1 Graphics clients, window managers, audio I/O

- +1 Boost is great for supplying nuts and bolts, but it's light on turnkey application frameworks

- Pivot in the direction of more embedded utilities

- GPIO, SPI, and I2C

- Drawing in young engineers with fresh ideas and free time

- Somebody making that happen

- Create a list of open questions

- Spend time at conferences cajoling people to act as review managers

- +1 Good opportunity to find people

- -1 Boost should not be "two-tier" i.e. those with travel budgets and those without

- Involve more women: Cold-call a colleague or a mailing list participant

- -1 Gender has no bearing in the Boost community

- -1 Information about a C++ contributor other than their code is irrelevant

- +1 Ignoring this as an issue is being "fine" with the "status quo"

- -1 It segregates people by qualities irrelevant to the community

- -1 It introduces a social divide

- -1 It takes away from the community's efficiency

- -1 The problems mentioned might not apply to online discussions

- -1 It abandons merit as the most important value

- -1 There's no reason to follow other organization's value system

- +1 There could be efforts to make any open-source community more welcoming

## Review

Problems mentioned:

- Declining level of participation as reviewers

- Difficulty to find a review manager

- Newcomers don't understand the review process, although others do

- Newcomers don't understand the process to become a maintainer

Proposed solutions:

- Somebody making that happen

Related problems:

- Requires new attractive proposals

...

On Thu, 7 Apr 2022 at 10:36, Adam Wulkiewicz via Boost < boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:

W dniu 07.04.2022 o 15:32, Mateusz Loskot via Boost pisze:

...

...

Although, I think (or hope) that we can all agree that there could be efforts to make most any open-source community be more welcoming. Yes, let's identify and eliminate technical barriers and chores

On Thu, 7 Apr 2022 at 15:29, William Linkmeyer via Boost wrote: that work against growing participation by users and contributors. +1

Adam

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On 4/19/22 01:26, Marcelo Zimbres Silva via Boost wrote: <snip>

Hi,

I think there still some points worth being discussed in this thread

<snip>

2. Make the review more transparent. If I understand correctly, almost anyone can be a review manager (criteria unclear) and that the acceptance is not decided counting yes and no votes. What happens however when the Review manager is not knowledgeable about the subject? How should he decide whether to accept or not? Authors want a fair treatment of their review.

<snip>

Marcelo

Boost Review Managers are vetted by the Review Wizards https://www.boost.org/community/reviews.html#Wizard. Part of the criteria is summed up as: "Approve the review manager based on initial acceptance by the library submitter, their participation in the Boost community, including the mailing list, previous reviews, and other forums." The goal is that the Review Manager is knowledgeable in the subject. There have been a few exceptions to that. If appropriate community participation occurs with experts, the process can still work fine. The Review Manager's duties are described here: https://www.boost.org/community/reviews.html#Review_Manager. The job of the Review Manager is explicitly not to tally up votes. They are to weigh the input from reviews and make an informed choice about the readiness of a library to enter Boost. Not all reviews are equal. Some reviews are very detailed and provide a great deal of background and reasoning. Other reviews are brief and look only at documentation or perhaps attempt to compile and run examples. All reviews provide important feedback but the feedback is used appropriately by the Review Manager. Boost reviews are somewhat grueling because of the intensity and level of expectation. Very often the Review Manager and Author will come to agreement for a negative outcome. The job of Review Manager is tough and requires some amount of finesse. Are you aware of a review in which author was unfairly treated? michael -- Michael Caisse