At the recent evening session in Jacksonville, many many things were
brought up in the realm of "tooling." These ranged all across the spectrum
of engineering tools, from IDE support, dependency management / discovery,
distribution, refactoring, and a host of other things.

On the fly, I tried to cobble those into a coherent goal for SG15 and the
committee to aim toward. It's currently phrased very much for the
committee audience (that's been part of my delay in re-summarizing here),
but as with any good mission statement I think it gets direction and
incentive structures aligned with the greater good. Put another way: it's
phrased selfishly, but hopefully produces great results for the entire
community.

So, here is that proposed mission statement:

In 10 years, the committee should be able to run compiler-informed queries
against a significant fraction of the open-source C++ community and use
that to inform deployment of refactoring tools to mitigate.

   - Consistent build understanding
   - Consistent package distribution / identification
   - Provide static analysis and refactoring to help provide users easy
   upgrades and modernization


Obviously this would be a huge task that requires support from many chunks
of the community - WG21 cannot be solely responsible, and it's outside of
what WG21 is normally great at. But we can help set direction, plan,
prioritize, and lend support to ideas that emerge along these lines.

So, I'd like to hear from everyone a bit: is this a good direction? Does it
capture what we'd like? Can we phrase it less selfishly?

If we're happy with holding this up as the long-term goal, we'll need to
break it down into more manageable pieces. I've privately asked a couple
people to sketch out what they envision it would take to get from where we
are to that proposed future. I'd like to broaden that call, and we'll look
collectively at those break-downs to try to formulate next steps.

Thoughts?
-Titus

PS: I've also just completed a big round of offloading in my day job, so
hopefully I'll have more cycles to pay attention to discussion on this
list. My apologies for my scattered attention so far.