Point Release Management and Development Sponsorship (WAS Re: [next release] Any new libraries ready for the nextrelease?)

On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 4:42 PM, Bjørn Roald <bjorn <at> 4roald.org> wrote:
>
> I agree in general that point releases are important.  However I get the
> nagging feeling there will always be a conflict of interest between moving
> forward in features and the maintenance of released libraries features.
> One question to address here is whether to let library authors and a main
> boost release team focus on the moving forward part and let others do the
> maintenance part as far as mechanizing the point release process.  Some
> collaboration between the two efforts would be natural and beneficial for
> both, but I think it is important that this does not become intrusive.  As I
> see it there are two great reasons for loving boost, it move C++ forward and
> it provide great production quality libraries.  I hope both these can be
> taken properly care of without getting in each others way.
>

I like this idea of having many release managers worry about the
releasing of suitably tested and properly packaged point/major
releases of the library. This way boost library authors can
concentrate on maintaining a single version of the library -- the one
in trunk for example -- which passes a test suite and performs as
expected.

What I see though is that the problem with this approach is/are the following:

* Changes to libraries can only be made by library
authors/maintainers, so if a bug is filed against a certain release
(1.35 for example) fixing it would be the responsibility of the
authors/maintainers of the library on that branch/release. If it was
possible to have bugs fixed by others in a given branch and changes
are licensed under the Boost Software License, then letting the