On Sun, Aug 23, 2015, Niall Douglas wrote:
Is acceptance of AFIO into Boost going to be judged on technical reasons, or politics, or "I don't understand the point of this library?"
Isn't "I don't understand the point of this library" a valid reason for rejection? This is where you may have compromised the review (in my opinion): - The documentation isn't very straightforward. To me, it feels like it is all over the place - The examples in the documentation (bar the first one) also aren't very straightforward - The coverage of APIBind and Monad just adds more distraction and overall confusion You have said some things which make people question whether they really even need AFIO: - On more than one occasion you claimed that nobody needs an asynchronous file I/O library (and synchronous I/O coupled with some concurrency facilities like threads are sufficient). - That one needs AFIO not for performance (which you've demonstrated that it doesn't offer) but for safety, reliability, etc. This alienates everyone who doesn't care about these things.
As soon as I challenged the authority of certain people with an alternative vision I was going to be heckled and hasseled every step of the way onwards, both publicly and behind my back. That much became very evident very early on, and for the record I wish it weren't so, but you play the hand you're dealt and in every case it has been someone who attacked me first even if that wasn't publicly known, and I responded because nobody else was going to and unlike other internet communities, there is not a strong central leadership here so you are on your own to fight Darwinian style on every little thing, so you get all this conflict and bitterness and unpleasantness resulting. Which is a shame: it's wasted energy better spent on writing code. But I also don't like being bullied, I *particularly* don't like other people being bullied, and there was a lot of bullying here back in 2012-2013 (much of which I think was unintentional and just a product of then Boost culture). That happens far less frequently now, and I would like to hope some of that less adversarial more supportive culture is due to my efforts and responses, even if it made me enemies along the way.
I feel compelled to say: I started contributing to Boost in 2012 when I was still at Microsoft and I observed none of the above: No conflict, no bitterness, and no unpleasantness. In fact I was encouraged enough by the experience to submit a library for a review, and later contribute to many other libraries. Glen