On 2 Apr 2015 at 11:56, Robert Ramey wrote:
You're advocating a whole different way of reviewing libraries. That's fine - but it has nothing to do with the incubator. Should Boost change it's way of reviewing/certifying libraries the the question of implementing the new system would be wide open.
I'll tell you my ideal outcome, and it's what I'll pitch after your talk. When a user thinks "I need a (C++) library to do X", they instantly think of http://choose.boost.org/. On that page is a set of user selectable fields which lets the user choose any ranking criteria they want, with results displayed with any detail columns of their choice. In the live populated results of ranked libraries, a button marked "Download" downloads a ready to go tarball of that library and all its dependencies. Another button marked "Live Trial" opens an online web compiler with that library preinstalled. Anyone can add any library to the database using a simple form. Boost's value add is that all results are scored by the same (hopefully high quality) rules, so if we choose the rules well then the best libraries bubble to the top, and the worst appear at the bottom. As you correctly point out, that is a completely different Boost to the current one. But then it *is* a "Boost 2.0". And note that one of the ranking criteria can be "has passed a peer review", in which case you've just selected Boost 1.x type libraries only for the results to display. Before you say this is pretty much what the Incubator does, I'll ask this: does the present implementation of the Incubator scale to 1,000 C++ libraries? All being repeatedly updated on a daily basis by automated Jenkins and Travis CI instances? What about multiple versions of those libraries, as surely C++ 11/14 only versions of well known libraries are coming and the 03 edition remains supported. Indeed, if BindLib proves popular, we'll even be seeing API versioning become popular, so library X may depend on vA to vD of the library Y API, but won't work with anything else. Niall -- ned Productions Limited Consulting http://www.nedproductions.biz/ http://ie.linkedin.com/in/nialldouglas/