On 5/17/2016 10:24 AM, Niall Douglas wrote:
On 16 May 2016 at 16:32, Michał Dominiak wrote:
A final note, again kind of repeating what Dave said (because I think it's extremely important and we tend to forget it these days): Boost is supposed to serve *the entire C++ community; it isn't Boost's goal to serve Boost's community*.
I wanted to repost tagging the Subject field to emphasise this exact sentiment which might have been missed (by Dave I assume you mean Dave Abrahams, it sounds like him anyway). I'd personally consider this paragraph the most important thing in your post and it sums up my personal position *exactly*.
The usual response is anyone proposing disruptive change to Boost is "somebody has to lead this out" or "Boost is community led" i.e. build consensus first. Both those responses do not allow for the highly disruptive clean fork of Boost necessary to return Boost to serving C++ at large, rather than the never ending Boost navel gazing it has become. Such a move can only be generated by non-passive leadership, and Boost doesn't have active leadership.
But I'll freely admit I have given up on trying to make any substantial changes to Boost. I prototyped as I said I would a Boost-lite transition layer suitable for a clean Boost fork which I'm using in all my own code. Nobody was interested.
Maybe no one was interested because no one knows what you are talking about.
The community *likes* things just the way they are: serving the Boost community, and to hell with the entire C++ community. A shame, and a waste, and I suspect in the long term self defeating.
Boost consists of about 130 different libraries. I venture to guess that there is not a single library author of those 130 different libraries that wouldn't like to see his library used more by the C++ community. But why you think that Boost library authors write only for other Boost library authors rather than for any C++ programmer is something you need to explain in specific terms. Just making that claim does not explain anything.