On Mon, Apr 2, 2018 at 2:08 PM, Titus Winters <titus_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> 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
>

Which I think is our main mistake. We have to stop thinking in terms of the
committee being the audience. When the real audience is are general, i.e.
not dedicated well informed, C++ users.


> (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?
>

I can't actually tell. As I don't see real concrete targets from user
perspectives. But I suspect not.


> Does it capture what we'd like?
>

AFAICT, no.


> Can we phrase it less selfishly?
>

Yes.

In 10 years, the committee should deliver to the C++ user community
specifications that tool vendors can use to produce a cohesive tool and
library ecosystem for the entire C++ community.
* Common reproducible and interchangeable building of C++ products.
* Common interoperable package specifications.

I can't speak for refactoring and related tooling as that's not an area I
concentrate in. Other than getting paid to fix other people's code that is
:-)

-- 
-- Rene Rivera
-- Grafik - Don't Assume Anything
-- Robot Dreams - http://robot-dreams.net