Le 17/05/15 11:00, John Maddock a écrit :
However, there is no easy way of telling which libraries are active and which are unmaintained. Do I invest time in learning and using a library that is unmaintained, or do I adapt to a newer library that is close enough to be useful and more likely to be updated with time? That's a good point, to a first approximation you could look to see when the last commit to master was (not very user friendly of course), I wonder if that information could be automated? Or would it be swamped by admin changes that aren't "real" releases?
In fact the more I think about this, the harder it is to tell, I bet there are many libraries that are mature enough that they get little or no maintenance - and frankly don't really need it. They worked fine yesterday, they'll work fine tomorrow. C++11/14/17 isn't going to change that. Perhaps in some cases move-aware constructors would be a useful addition, but that may be all.
You could look at Trac to see if there are large numbers of open issues - but you know what, old libraries accumulate "unfixable cruft". It doesn't necessarily make them broken/unmaintained/obsolete. Speaking only for myself, I generally prefer to leave these open rather than gratuitously close as "won't fix", even though they will *probably* never be fixed.
Next follows some reports that could help: Open Bug count by Component - https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/report/24 Newest closed ticket by component - https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/report/40 Oldest modified active ticket by component - https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/report/39 As any figures, these are just figures. Common sense is needed.
Maybe we need some kind of survey, say 2 libraries a week, skip any that are obviously maintained and then ask the questions: Good idea.
* Is the maintainer still around? * Does it matter - is it accumulating issues? * Does anything need doing to bring it into C++11/14 land? * Has it been obsoleted - which is to say, does it make sense to use this in new code?
This report Newest closed ticket by component - https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/report/40?sort=modified&asc=1&page=1 gives a good hint of libraries that could be unmaintained. A library that don't have new fixed issues and that have a lot of them could be a candidate that merits to be inspected. Vicente