Re: Periodical releases

[Dave Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com>]

on Thu Jan 05 2012, Eli Zaretskii <eliz-AT-gnu.org> wrote:

>> From: Dave Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com>
>> Date: Wed, 04 Jan 2012 22:36:24 -0500
>> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> 
>> For what it's worth, Boost has no full-time people, and it releases four
>> times yearly.
>
> How tightly are the various libraries in Boost connected?  I.e., if
> one of them is broken, how many others will become broken as result?

Some are extremely loose and some have direct dependencies.  But one
thing we have had practically since the beginning is a fairly complete
set of regression tests.  Without that, I don't see how our pace of
releases would be possible.

> The "People" page of the Boost site shows 48 developers.  How
> intensely does each one of them work on Boost?  

I think Ohloh has the best information on this:
http://www.ohloh.net/p/boost

> For that matter, how many hours do you personally spend on Boost
> weekly, if I may ask?

I haven't had much time to do programming for Boost in the past few
years.  I'm not sure what the relevance is, though...

> I would be surprised if Emacs had more than 10 to 15 active
> maintainers at any given time.  I don't know how many hours others
> spend, but I can only devote about maybe 5 hours or less each week.

Arguably, the more people contributing code, the harder the job of
managing stable releases gets :-)

-- 
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com