Re: [boost] RFC: Community maintained libraries

AMDG On 12/05/2013 12:59 PM, Alexander Lamaison wrote:

Andrey Semashev writes:

...

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.

I anticipate this only happening in two rare situations, one extremely rare. The more common case would be where a maintainer is uncontactable or unable to devote enough time to make the changes.

This has never been a real problem in the past for minor changes, provided that someone with commit access is motivated enough to: - Understand the library well enough to avoid accidentally breaking something - Write the fix - Write test cases for the fix - Take responsibility for any problems that appear - etc. The administrative overhead of asking for permission on the list is relatively minor. (My usual policy is Email 1: Okay to commit? Email 2: It's going in, unless someone objects immediately.) For major changes, there will be problems, so if the maintainer is missing, then whoever is doing the work needs to be willing to step up as the new maintainer.

The second, rare case would be where, after exhaustive debate on the list, the community is overwhelmingly in favour of a direction for the library but the maintainer simply refuses. It's hard to see any reason why the maintainer should be able to veto the whole community for all time.

I don't see any point in discussing this. I don't expect this situation to come up, ever. Not to mention that in such a situation, it's quite possible that the maintainer is right anyway, since he presumably knows the library better than anyone else. In Christ, Steven Watanabe