Proposed Changes To Library Submissions

Overview Of Proposed Process

• Learn about Boost.
• Determine interest.
• Add a Wiki Under Construction Page (new step)
• Preliminary submission.
• Request Mentor (new step)
• Refinement.
• Submission for review.
• Formal Review.
• Web site posting.
• People page.
• Lifecycle.

How Mentoring Might Work

The development of a boost library typically takes months/years from conception to finally becoming part of boost. To sucessfully navigate the obsticles requires lots of knowledge about how boost works.

The basic role of a boost development mentor is to guide a new library developer thru the boost process. In essence to provide someone to help give new submitters a helping hand. The expectation is that a library mentor might spend a couple hours a month answering email questions to fulfill this role (if it exceeds this then it this process will not be practical. Almost all the boost developers are very busy people and we are now adding another thing to do.

Some specific functions include:

• Be a first reviewer / sounding board for the library developer
• Answer questions about boost processes
• Answer questions about boost build and other practices
• Make sure the new developer is following the submission process

Note that a new library developer is not restricted to using the mentor for asking questions -- in fact, they should be encouraged to use the mailing lists where a the larger group can help.

Wiki Under Construction Pages

One of the issues with the current Boost web structure is that it is quite difficult to find out about libraries that are in progress and it is difficult to others with similar interests. It was suggested that we formally add Wiki pages to track and organize this progress better.

While this already exists to some extent in the LibrariesUnderConstruction Wiki page, this page would be linked from the Boost mainpage and each library under construction would maintain it's own 'under construction page'. I've prototyped a new version of the under construction page LibrariesUnderConstruction-New.

New Boost Vault

There is a new file storage area that new boost developers can use to share their library with the world.

http://boost-sandbox.sourceforge.net/vault/