On Fri, 14 May 2021 at 17:27, Eyal Rozenberg via Std-Proposals
<std-proposals_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> You seem to be making several assumptions:
>
> 1. It is within the committee's mandate/scope of activities to improve
> discoverability of C++ libraries.
>
> 2. A committee-hosted/committee-blessed set of libraries will be
> significantly more discoverable than such libraries are today.
>
>
> I'm somewhat doubtful of (1.), although I might be wrong. I'm pretty
> sure (2.) is not true. Most C++ developers are barely aware, if at all,
> of the existence of the standardization committee.

There's no particular trouble with (1). The committee can spend its
time on whatever it wishes,
the SC22-level restrictions apply to what formal standards the
committee publishes. Informal
ones are free game, as are study group discussions, working group
discussions, evening sessions
and so forth.

I continue to think it's a mistake to start with the assumption that
it's a good thing to strive for
a set of "blessed" libraries. We already have dozens of those sets.

> However, as Richard Hodges suggests - perhpas you're actually hinting at
> the equivalent of the standard(ish) package manager that some languages
> sport - Python (pip & PyPI), Rust (cargo), Ruby (gem), Javascript (npm)
> and so on?

The problem here is that there are fistfuls of such package managers
already. This
thread mentions two of them, and then there are many others, like
operating system
package managers. If someone decides that "conan (or vcpackage) should
and will win", fine, go
work on conan (or vcpackage). I don't believe that'll change the
overall discoverability of C++ libraries
if that restriction is baked into the endeavor from the beginning. I
have no problem with a particular
package manager winning, I just doubt such a victory will be
overwhelming and wholesale,
so a need for a general library search will remain in place.

> If that's what you mean - that's not exactly what you've written. You've
> focused on blessing specific libraries rather than formalizing/blessing
> a library discovery mechanism. The latter seems closer to what the
> committee would consider.

We've talked about a set of blessed libraries in 2012. There were all
sorts of reservations and pushback from some communities,
like boost, back then. A discovery mechanism probably wouldn't run
into those problems, indeed.