Community Maintainence Team - a Modest proposal
Today at 12:45 in Bethe is the operations meeting of the Boost Community Library Maintainence team. In advance of that meeting I'd like to render my proposal on this list so I have it written down. Premise:The library maintainence team does not and will likely never have sufficient resources to maintain libraries without current maintainers. Proposal: a) The CMT will solicit volunteers to take over maintainence of specific libraries. b) The most likely source of such volunteers are those working in companies which use and depend upon the libraries in maintainence. Such companies will be expected to support the library maintainence by permitting the maintainer to undertake this effort using company time and resources. c) Since we don't have a list of which companies are using which libraries, we will send a solicitation to volunteer to every person who has posted a bug report for the library in question on the TRAC system. I believe this is the most likely source for prospective maintainers. d) Companies that support maintainence of a particular library will be permited to place their logo and link on the TRAC page for that library. So they will receive the following benefits from sponsoring the maintainece of the library. 1) They will be demonstrating their commitment to the high standard of software development that Boost supports. 2) By placing their logo and link on the track page, they will be encouraging and facilitating prospective employees who desire to work for such an organization to contact them. That is, they will have a leg up on attracting the highest quality C++ programmers. 3) They will be guarenteed timely and rigorous maintainence of the library which they depend on. 4) They will have the inside track on proposing and implementing any library enhancements that they desire. 5) They will benefit from collaboration of the boost community which provides numerous valuable benefits: Bug fixes submitted by users, suggestions for enhancements. etc. The value of all these benefits to the sponsoring company will far, far out weigh the incremental cost of the employee time. In many cases, since employees have to maintain the library anyway - the incremental cost is zero anyway. This moves the responsibility for library maintainence to those most willing and able to undertake it. The role of the CMT would be to promote, recruit, certify, and monitor library maintainence. The CMT would have the authority to move the responsability from maintainer to another. The current practice of having a single person/entity responsible for maintainence of a library would continue unchanged. Robert Ramey
Is the CMT going to maintain those libraries that nobody is willing to maintain?
"Gonzalo BG" <gonzalobg88@gmail.com> wrote in message news:CAPMgRLTHe_RPxPWUx_jCU_VHn_U0jp5A6xwVGUusJ+9x1Mfm_g@mail.gmail.com...
Is the CMT going to maintain those libraries that nobody is willing to maintain?
It's been trying, but the job is overwhelming. This is the motivation for my proposal Robert Ramey
I like all this, but.. On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 9:14 AM, Robert Ramey <ramey@rrsd.com> wrote:
c) Since we don't have a list of which companies are using which libraries, we will send a solicitation to volunteer to every person who has posted a bug report for the library in question on the TRAC system. I believe this is the most likely source for prospective maintainers.
It might be both easier to maintain and more attractive to companies if that mention was in the library documentation instead of track. -- -- Rene Rivera -- Grafik - Don't Assume Anything -- Robot Dreams - http://robot-dreams.net -- rrivera/acm.org (msn) - grafikrobot/aim,yahoo,skype,efnet,gmail
"Rene Rivera" <grafikrobot@gmail.com> wrote in message news:CAHEh_GgLLJEFWWtLv0XxNz8TkF-5w=W-VaH8mc3e_3uBsQiJYA@mail.gmail.com...
I like all this, but..
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 9:14 AM, Robert Ramey <ramey@rrsd.com> wrote:
c) Since we don't have a list of which companies are using which libraries, we will send a solicitation to volunteer to every person who has posted a bug report for the library in question on the TRAC system. I believe this is the most likely source for prospective maintainers.
It might be both easier to maintain and more attractive to companies if that mention was in the library documentation instead of track.
LOL - OK - Let's have it BOTH ways. We'll mention the lack of maintainer in both TRAC and the documentation. Then we'll point to the policy describing the obligations, rights and benefits to sponsoring maintainence. Robert Ramey
Rene, In my presentation yesterday, I proposed that we look at the boost web presence including, website, wike, maybe trac, and all he stuff we have. My view is that we would benefit from taking a step back and bringing it up to date. I know you've been the maintainer on this but that's it's quite a big job. I also know that Beman has shown interest in lending financial support for the work you do on the boost/release part. I think the job is just to big for you to do at the same time you're the main person responsible for the boost/release. Also I want to draw more volunteers into boost and I think this is a good place for them. What I would like to do is see if we can off load the Web presence to some new candidate (or two). I don't know how you feel about this, but I do want to advocate for the idea in any case. The purpose of this email is to give you a heads up so that I'm not catching you by surprise and that you have an opportunity to contribute the discussion if you so desire. This will be the subject of a Boost operational meeting scheduled for Friday at 12:45. I will be posting for volunteers to attend the meeting on Thursday. Robert Ramey
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 10:56 AM, Robert Ramey <ramey@rrsd.com> wrote:
Rene,
In my presentation yesterday, I proposed that we look at the boost web presence including, website, wike, maybe trac, and all he stuff we have. My view is that we would benefit from taking a step back and bringing it up to date. I know you've been the maintainer on this but that's it's quite a big job. I also know that Beman has shown interest in lending financial support for the work you do on the boost/release part. I think the job is just to big for you to do at the same time you're the main person responsible for the boost/release. Also I want to draw more volunteers into boost and I think this is a good place for them. What I would like to do is see if we can off load the Web presence to some new candidate (or two). I don't know how you feel about this, but I do want to advocate for the idea in any case. The purpose of this email is to give you a heads up so that I'm not catching you by surprise and that you have an opportunity to contribute the discussion if you so desire. This will be the subject of a Boost operational meeting scheduled for Friday at 12:45. I will be posting for volunteers to attend the meeting on Thursday.
I'm all for other people doing the web work, and any other work :-) It's not like I intended from the start to be the only person doing any of this. But I'm the kind of person if something needs doing I just do it (and ask question later). I'm particularly happy with the work Adam is doing to improve the regression results, for example. And of course the continued help from Daniel J on wedsite stuff (he does most of the minor maintenance now). As for someone helping me by giving financial support.. That would be something I would need to discuss with my current employer if it's a significant amount of time (it's not out of the question since we do contracting). But that's something to talk about offline. -- -- Rene Rivera -- Grafik - Don't Assume Anything -- Robot Dreams - http://robot-dreams.net -- rrivera/acm.org (msn) - grafikrobot/aim,yahoo,skype,efnet,gmail
On 12 May 2015 at 8:14, Robert Ramey wrote:
Today at 12:45 in Bethe is the operations meeting of the Boost Community Library Maintainence team. In advance of that meeting I'd like to render my proposal on this list so I have it written down. [snip] This moves the responsibility for library maintainence to those most willing and able to undertake it. The role of the CMT would be to promote, recruit, certify, and monitor library maintainence. The CMT would have the authority to move the responsability from maintainer to another. The current practice of having a single person/entity responsible for maintainence of a library would continue unchanged.
Myself and Robert spent much time in the bar last night discussing this. It was a very valuable discussion I think. I think it's a great idea. My only addition is that I think (and I believe Robert agrees) that we need to become far more aggressive at marking libraries as unmaintained. If the maintainer doesn't reply to email for over a year nor commits any new code, I think their name needs to be removed as maintainer and the CMT adds that library to the unmaintained list. Right now a maintainer has to explicitly notify Boost they are abandoning a library, otherwise their name remains in some cases for five years or more. By the most aggressive measurements, about 60 Boost libraries are unmaintained or undermaintained (about half of the total). No one is proposing that anything is done about undermaintained libraries. If a maintainer makes a single commit in a year, or replies to a single email, they remain as maintainer. Niall -- ned Productions Limited Consulting http://www.nedproductions.biz/ http://ie.linkedin.com/in/nialldouglas/
participants (4)
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Gonzalo BG -
Niall Douglas -
Rene Rivera -
Robert Ramey