On Thursday 05 December 2013 10:06:55 Steven Watanabe wrote:
AMDG
On 12/05/2013 09:36 AM, Alexander Lamaison wrote:
======== Proposal ========
My proposal goes further than Beman's and gives "Community maintainership" to all but the most well-maintained libraries. Each library would still have a named maintainer and this would be their role:
<snip>
This wouldn't help anything. Every effort to create a group that does general maintenance in the past has fizzled out when most of the participants lose interest. If we can't even manage this for a few libraries that have no active maintainer at all, it's completely hopeless to try to establish it for even more libraries.
While I can see why this idea may fail because of lack of interest, I sympathize Alexander's point that the community should play larger role in libraries development. There are examples when blanket changes needed to be applied to multiple libraries, like macro updates Stephen Kelly did. There are cases when trivial fixes needed to be made in someone else's library. Surely github adds pull requests to the available options, but pull requests still have to be processed by a single or a few maintainers, which become a bottleneck and a single authority about the library. I think Alexander is making a good point that the membership in the Community group should represent the right to apply changes and not an obligation to do active maintenance of every library in Boost. Such an obligation is unrealistic to fulfill, indeed. But for one, I'd like to be able to make changes to the libraries I don't develop or maintain. There is a slippery edge in this idea though. While I'd welcome people making fixes and relatively small improvements to the libraries I maintain, I'd feel unease if design decisions were made without my consent. It's not about the lack of trust for the community, but rather because such decisions could interfere with my vision of the library utility and future development. Of course, it is difficult to define which changes are small and which are considered architectural, and my vision of the library is obviously subjective. This makes a lot of grey area. Voting doesn't look like a viable solution, since there may be a simple lack of quorum. Remember that we have problems with the amount of reviews for libraries, and there's no reason to believe it'll be different with voting. I think there has to be an upper hand in controversial and design-defining cases, and right now I don't see a better candidate than the library maintainer. After all, he has arguably the best knowledge of the library.