Re: [boost] [text] [review] Text formal review result

On 6/26/2020 10:02 PM, Zach Laine via Boost wrote:

On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 6:05 PM Jeff Garland via Boost wrote:

[snip]

...

And now I'll say some fairly radical things. To me this just says that as an organization we should consider alternate paths to boost adoption. For example, perhaps if a library is proposed for the standard it should automatically be allowed to become a boost 'experimental library' that would ship with releases. The library might not be maintained by the paper authors, but maybe we could coax more authors into realizing there's a benefit to shipping here in the form of massive user exposure. And we could still have a review -- but maybe the experimental acceptance wouldn't hinge on the results.

I don't know how this would work exactly, and I find it concerning that we would essentially have a lower bar for stuff that is targeting the standard, where it will eventually be chiseled into stone.

However, where we might improve would be in lowering the bar to entry required just to submit a library for review. These hurdles currently exist:

- This list is not very welcoming. One committee proposal I know of that is exactly the right kind of thing for Boost did not submit to Boost because they felt this list was rude and combative. I don't know the details, so I don't know if this particular complaint is warranted. More generally, this list is hard for outsiders to penetrate; pretty good evidence for this is the fact that we have posts here mostly from the usual suspects, and new voices don't appear very often. I have no suggested fixes for this, unfortunately. - It can be hard to figure out how to submit to Boost, and once you do, the process is pretty involved. We've addressed part of this by having a list of names of Boosters who have volunteered to act as review managers for stuff targeting the standard. Having yet more people volunteer to walk people through the process, and/or better document the process, would help here. As one example, is getting endorsements actually necessary? The submission process page says that it is, but that step seems to be skipped pretty often from what I can tell. Maybe I'm just not paying enough attention. - The build system and other infrastructure is unlike anything anywhere else, and super obscure, because it is not documented well enough to do anything but copy/paste from an existing Boost lib. We could of course use something that is used more widely.

I want to see more std lib proposals come through Boost first, and I think a lot of you do, too. However, for that to happen at a larger scale than what we're seeing today (which is me alone as far as I can tell), we would need to sand off those rough edges I mentioned. The status quo is that it's simply so much easier to submit straight to LEWG that only a crazy person would do otherwise (again, that would be me).

You have raised a bunch of hackles here. The LEWG, along with all other C++ standard committees, seems to me so much less open to debate than Boost is that it is hard to know what to say about your assertion that "This list is not very welcoming". Nor can anything ever be found out from the C++ standards committee why such and such was accepted or rejected, or what the arguments were about after the fact. Finally the poobahs of the C++ standard committee I have often found to be largely unfriendly and closed in their determination that only they really know what is good or not for C++.