This page is meant to outline a proposed new distributed development process for Boost C++ Libraries.

Rationale

• We want to lower the barrier to entry for contributors to the Boost C++ Library. In the current centralized development process, contributors are discouraged from contributing because:
  • Patches in Trac don't get applied quite fast enough because a maintainer still has to manually do it.
  • Getting commit access to the central repository is a manual process.
  • Before anybody can typically help in the maintenance of a library, that person has to do quite a lot of work without much certainty of success, and in the end mostly is a judgment call by an original maintainer.
• We want to make including libraries into a Boost Distribution a trivial process. In the current centralized process this means moving the code into a central repository then having maintainers manually merge the changes from the main development branch (trunk) into the release branch -- this is a problem because the risk of failure is high.
• We want to increase community participation in different aspects of the project like testing, promotion, documentation, BoostCon, and standardization. At the moment there's a lot of work to be done for Boost libraries but a lot of it has not been properly identified and publicized. This is coupled with the high barrier to entry for contributors and you have only a small community of developers trying to do all the work that other non-developers may very well be able to do. With regard to standardization, there are Boost C++ Libraries that would be great to have in the ISO standard -- the effort of championing these libraries currently fall on the shoulders of just the library maintainer, which can be done by others already in the committee or someone else willing to champion that effort.
• We want to enable the Boost project to scale up to have more than one distribution. As it is at the moment there is only one Boost C++ Library distribution which contains all the accepted libraries.