On 17 Aug 2015 at 8:09, Robert Ramey wrote:
To me it's very unfortunate that so much effort has had to be expended by a library author to produce a library that is not accepted. It's also unfortunate that so many reviewers need to spend this much time to dig up enough information to reach this consensus. This illustrates my motivation behind the design of the boost library incubator. Imagine an alternate scenario.
a) Vinicius submits his library to the incubator. He did this exactly as requested and fulfilled all the requirements listed in the incubator. I don't think he found the process onerous in anyway. So far so good.
b) One person commented on his submission and Vinicius replied. So far so good.
c) Now we come up with the review and only then do we get a really serious look at the library in all it's aspects. The criticism is constructive, but it's too late to change the submission.
d) Had Vinicius gotten this feedback earlier, the submission would have been different or perhaps not even reviewed at all.
In fairness, Vinicius had substantial feedback privately sent to him long before the review by at least three people I know of (including myself). I explicitly did not post my feedback onto the incubator because I felt it was inappropriate given the development state of the library at that time. I think the Incubator is appropriate for libraries which have matured and are not undergoing continuing rapid development. Otherwise comments placed there are automatically out of date and misleading and could even been seen as an unwarranted permanent black mark uneraseable from Google. Personally speaking, I've always wished that after 500 github commits an Incubator comment would be deleted. I appreciate there is a fair bit of complexity implementing that automatically however.
e) Had people started to download the library, run the tests and try to use it in their own code a lot of information would have come out much earlier. This information would have been helpful to everyone involved. This didn't happen. Or at least, not that I know of. Neither the incubator nor github keep statistics on library downloads. I does keep statistics on views of the library page. These statistics can be displayed via the "Display Statistics" button on the library page. They show 701 pages views in the last 90 days.
I think no one uses a proposed Boost library really until it goes for review unless your name is Eric Niebler or someone equally famous, and even then I remember Eric telling me he reckoned no more than 50 people are really looking at Ranges in any depth. I think that's entirely the whole point of the Boost review really: expert eyeballs. FYI I know of about seven people who have ever even tried AFIO in 30 months. It's too niche, though when you see my brand new workshop tutorial with benchmarks on Friday I think that might radically change :). Niall -- ned Productions Limited Consulting http://www.nedproductions.biz/ http://ie.linkedin.com/in/nialldouglas/