Hartmut Kaiser | 5 Nov 15:19
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[Review] GGL review starts today, November 5th


Hi all,

The formal review of the Generic Geometry Library (GGL) starts today,
November 5, 2009 and will finish November 15, 2009. 
GGL is being developed by Barend Gehrels, Bruno Lalande and Mateusz Loskot,
with substantial input from this Boost mailing list.

------------------------------------------------

About the library:

GGL defines concepts for geometries and implements some algorithms on such
geometries.

GGL is header-only, and can be applied in all software where geometry plays
a small or a larger role. Users of the library can use just only one
function, such as distance:

    int a[2] = {1,1}; 
    int b[2] = {2,3}; 
    double d = ggl::distance(a, b);

Library users can also use the library in combination with std::vector,
boost::tuple's and boost::ranges, such as:

    std::vector<boost::tuple<double, double, double> > line;
    line.push_back(boost::make_tuple(1, 2, 3));
    line.push_back(boost::make_tuple(4, 5, 6));
    line.push_back(boost::make_tuple(7, 8, 9));
(Continue reading)

Fernando Cacciola | 5 Nov 16:21
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[boost] [Review Results] Boost.Polygon library accepted into boost

Dear Boosters,

[first of all allow me to apology for not doing this before. My small  
consulting bussines suddenly grew out of proportion and now is way  
over my head, keeping me working/managing 16 hours a day]

I am pleased to announce that the Boost.Polygon library from Lucanus  
Simonson
has been accepted into boost provided some of the most critical  
concerns,
detailed below, are addressed first.

First of all I would like to thank Lucanus and Intel Corporation for  
making this
work available to all C++ developers around the world.

I would also like to thank all the reviewers that participated (in no  
particular
order nor degree of participation)

Thomas Klimpel
Frank Mori Hess
Barend Gehrels
Andreas Fabri
Jeffrey Hellrung
Tim Keitt
Markus Werle
Paul A. Bristow
Robert Stewart
Mathias Gaunard
(Continue reading)

Hartmut Kaiser | 15 Nov 15:50
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[Review] GGL review extended until November 22nd

Hi all,

The discussions around GGL are just start ramping up and we received only 2
(voting) reviews so far. Additionally, several people have been asking me
off-list to extend the review period as they otherwise wouldn't be able to
write a review in time. For these reasons the review period for the GGL
library will be extended for another week. 

The review period will now end November 22nd.

For everybody considering to vote: this would be a good time to write a
review!

Regards Hartmut
GGL Review Manager 

-------------------
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http://boostcon.com

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Beman Dawes | 18 Nov 19:26
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Boost release 1.41.0 available

Boost release 1.41.0 is now available.

This release contains one new library and numerous bug fixes for existing libraries. For details, including download links, see  http://www.boost.org/users/news/version_1_41_0

The release can also be downloaded directly from SourceForge. See http://sourceforge.net/projects/boost/files/

To install this release on your system, see http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_41_0/more/getting_started/index.html

Thanks,

--The Boost release team

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John Maddock | 20 Nov 14:24
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[1.41.0] PDF Build of documentation available.

A PDF build of the documentation for Boost-1.41 (for those libraries that 
support it) is now available from the usual sourceforge download site: 
https://sourceforge.net/projects/boost/files/ in the boost-docs/1.41.0 
folder.

Direct URL's
are:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/boost/files/boost-docs/1.41.0/boost_pdf_1_41_0.tar.gz/download

(23Mb)
https://sourceforge.net/projects/boost/files/boost-docs/1.41.0/boost_pdf_1_41_0.zip/download

(22.5Mb)
https://sourceforge.net/projects/boost/files/boost-docs/1.41.0/boost_pdf_1_41_0.tar.bz2/download

(22.2Mb)
https://sourceforge.net/projects/boost/files/boost-docs/1.41.0/boost_pdf_1_41_0.7z/download 
(21Mb)

Enjoy!

John. 

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Hartmut Kaiser | 22 Nov 16:59
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[Review] GGL Review ends today, November 22nd

Hi all,

The review of the Generic Geometry Library officially ends today, November
22nd. Please send in your reviews if you have not done so yet. If you need
more time for your review, please get in contact directly with me to work
out some individual schedule.

Regards Hartmut
GGL Review Manager

-------------------
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http://boostcon.com

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Hartmut Kaiser | 24 Nov 18:15
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2nd Call for Participation - BoostCon 2010

Please distribute!

--------------------------------
4th Annual Boost Conference 2010
--------------------------------
Aspen CO, USA, May 4-10, 2010, www.boostcon.com

2nd Call for participation
----------------------

We invite you to submit session proposals to the 4th Annual Boost
Conference: BoostCon 2010 (Aspen CO, USA, May 10-14, 2010).

Traditionally the main face-to-face event for all things Boost
(www.boost.org), BoostCon 2010 will present leading speakers from
the whole C++ community. From using the Boost libraries to writing
and maintaining them, from evangelizing to deploying Boost within
your organization, from infrastructure and process to vision and
mission, and the new C++ Standard, BoostCon brings together the
sessions, the colleagues, and the inspiration to support your work
with C++ and Boost in particular for the next year.

To reflect the breadth of the Boost community, the conference
includes sessions aimed at two constituencies: Boost end-users
and hard-core Boost library and tool developers. The program
fosters interaction and engagement within and across those two
groups, with an emphasis on hands-on, participatory sessions.

Session topics
--------------
Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to, the
following:

* General tutorial sessions introducing one or more Boost
  libraries
* In-depth sessions on using specific Boost libraries
* Case studies on using Boost
* Experts panels
* Advanced sessions on implementation techniques used within
  Boost libraries
* C++0x and how it will change life for users and library writers
* Development workshops to extend or enhance existing Boost
  libraries
* Workshops on design process
* Infrastructure workshops such as Build tools, Website, Testing
* Concepts and Generic Programming
* Hardware and infrastructure presentations focused on how
  libraries can make better use of the technology
* Other topics likely to be of great interest to Boost users and
  developers

Interactive and collaborative sessions are encouraged, as this is
the nature of both the on-line Boost community and the style of
learning and participation that has proven most successful at
such events. Sessions can be tutorial based, with an emphasis on
interaction and participant involvement, or workshop based,
whether hands-on programming or paper-based, discussion-driven
collaborative work.

Session formats
---------------
Presentations
Presentations focus on a practitioner's ideas and experience with
anything relevant to Boost and Boost users.

Panels
Panels feature three or four people presenting their ideas and
experiences relating to Boost's relevant, controversial, emerging,
or unresolved issues. Panels may be conducted in several ways,
such as comparative, analytic, or historic.

Tutorials
Tutorials are sessions at which instructors teach conference
participants specific Boost-relevant skills.

Workshops
Workshops provide an active arena for advancements in Boost-
relevant topics. Workshops provide the opportunity for experienced
practitioners to develop new ideas about a topic of common interest
and experience.

Author's Corner Presentations
These were introduced at BoostCon 2008, and were a great success.
They are short (30 minute) sessions, focusing on tips on usage and
design. In addition, we're looking to uncover the hidden design gems
in Boost libraries.

Tool Vendors Presentations
We actively encourage tool vendors and ISP's to submit proposals
for a special Tool Vendors Session Track aimed at products related
to Boost and C++ (compilers, libraries, tools, etc.).

Other formats may also be of interest. Don't hold back a proposal
just because it doesn't fit into a pigeonhole.

Submitting a proposal
---------------------
Standard Sessions are 90 minutes. You may submit a proposal for
fractions or multiples of 90-minutes. Fractional proposals will be
grouped into 90 minute sessions covering related topics.
Longer sessions, such as tutorials and classes, will be assigned 90
minute, three hour (i.e. half day), or six hour (i.e. full day) time
slots.

Please include:

* The working title.
* Type of session: presentation, panel, tutorial, workshop, authors
  corner, vendor track, other.
* A paragraph or two describing the topic covered, suitable for the
  conference web site.
* Proposed length: 10-20 minute short talks, 45 minutes, 90 minutes,
  half day, full day.
* Alternate lengths, if you are willing to make adjustments: 10-20
  minute short-talks, 45 minutes, 90 minutes, half-day, full day.
* Audience: users, developers, both.
* Level: basic, intermediate, advanced.
* A biography, suitable for the conference web site.
* Your contact information (will not be made public).

Submission details
------------------
All submissions have to be done through the EasyChair conference
management system: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=boostcon10.
If you have not already registered at EasyChair, you will need to
do so in order to submit your proposal.

All submissions will go through a peer review process.
Authors are invited (but are not required) to submit PDF versions of
full papers of up to 10 pages in ACM conference proceedings format
(see http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates). The
full papers are not required unless you want them published in the
proceedings.

All accepted proposals will be made available in the Association for
Computing Machinery (ACM) Digital Library (approval pending). Best
papers, after further reviews, will be considered to be book
chapters or journal articles in a renowned journal.

The session materials go on the BoostCon website and will be
available to attendees.

For general information on the BoostCon 2010 paper submission or
the scope of technical papers solicited, please refer to the
conference website at www.boostcon.com. For any other questions
about the submission process or paper format, please contact the
Program Committee at boostcon10 <at> easychair.com. If you have any
technical problems with EasyChair, please contact EasyChair for
help.

Note: Presenters must agree to grant a non-exclusive perpetual
license to publish submitted materials, either electronically or
in print, in any media related to BoostCon.

Important dates
---------------
Proposal submissions due: Dec 10th, 2009.
Proposals decisions sent (tentative program available): Jan 15th,
2010.
Fully scheduled program available: Feb 5th, 2010.
Session materials due: Apr 15th, 2010.

Hartmut Kaiser, email: hartmut.kaiser <at> gmail.com (Program Committee
Chair)
David Abrahams, email: dave <at> boostpro.com (Conference Chair)

On behalf of the conference organizers

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Hartmut Kaiser | 28 Nov 18:34
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GGL Review Results


Hi all,

The review of the Generic Geometry Library is over now. We have had vibrant
discussions with regards to the library itself. In addition those stirred up
a lot of controversial discussion about the Boosts review process. In this
review results I will concentrate on the library at hands.

Formally this review ended with 12 YES and 2 NO votes. This result reflects
the overall discussion and the general consensus of this library being worth
to be included into Boost. 

Based on this result and the discussions the Generic geometry Library has
been formally accepted into Boost.

It is worth highlighting that most of the reviewers emphasized the excellent
quality of the library design. Here are some quotes:
- "The design is very clear. I think it can serve as a standard example of
how to cover a big non trivial problem domain using meta-programming,
partial specialization and tag dispatch to make it uniformly accessible by a
set of generic algorithms." 
- "The design looks clear enough so that I was able to understand about what
was being done. Adding concept checking is a good idea. It also surely is a
modern generic design."
- "I am quite pleased with the use of tag-dispatching and strategies. I was
happy to see this approach taken and by looking at the documentation and
source code it seems sound. I believe this approach offers the greatest
latitude for a generic library."

At the same time the 2 NO votes reflect a couple of shortcomings which still
need to be addressed before final inclusion into SVN. Here is a list of
contingencies noted by the reviewers:

- Robustness: algorithmic robustness and arithmetic stability have been
discussed widely. The consensus of the reviewers is that all algorithms need
to be robust and that the user should be able to make sure all calculations
are arithmetically stable. GGL addresses arithmetic stability by allowing to
instantiate all algorithms with arbitrary number types. But it turns out not
the entire library has been converted to use this scheme yet. Any design
issues that would prevent strong robustness guarantees (without drastic
refactoring) in the future should be identified and fixed prior to release.
The documentation needs to reflect the actual guarantees and complexities of
every algorithm.

- Concepts: more refinement needs to be done for the existing concepts. At
least 2 users claimed to not have been able to adapt their data structures
to the existing scheme. The library aims for defining the concepts and
interfaces for future geometry related work in Boost, so these use cases
need to be addressed. Users mentioned the missing concept inheritance. This
might be a good way to address the current problems of concepts being too
fine grained and too difficult to use. What needs to be done at minimum is
to enhance the flexibility of the concept mechanism enabling to adapt user
provided data structures more easily. The concepts need to be sound even in
the light of extensions.

- Boolean operations: while the library provides a set of Boolean operations
those seem to be not complete and/or robust in terms of
clockwise/counterclockwise geometries, closed/open polygons. Robust Boolean
operations are a strong requirement, so this should be fixed as reported by
at least one reviewer.

- Documentation: the documentation of the library is not complete and needs
additional effort. Using Doxygen alone as a documentation tool has its
(known) shortcomings when it comes to generic libraries. The authors already
mentioned to plan to switch to QuickBook after review allowing to have
better control over the generated docs. 

- Testing: several reviewers mentioned the need for a thorough testing
framework allowing the verification of the correctness of the algorithms in
a wide range of use cases. Different test strategies need to be employed,
such as high volume and random tests, known border case tests, tests using
different numeric precision types, etc.

Minor (non-contingency) issues:

- Names of used concepts: currently the library is using mainly terms as
established by the OpenGIS Consortium (OGC). This is misleading for users
coming from different (non-GIS) domains. It has been suggested to introduce
different namespaces for the different geometry domains (GIS, graphics, 3D,
etc.) allowing to use the expected terminology established in that
particular domain. 

- Name of the library: the name 'GGL - Generic Geometry Library' is
misleading as it is not a generic geometry library but a library using
generic programming techniques related to geometry. It has been suggested to
use the name Boost.Geometry instead. This is not a requirement imposed by
the review results, but I would like to suggest to the authors to consider
renaming.

- Integration with Boost.Units has been suggested. The library does not need
to be completetly integrated with Boost.Units, although it appears to be
reasonable to deal with types as exposed by Boost.Units especially for
distance and area calculations.

- Spatial data structures (such as spatial trees) have been mentioned to be
crucial for a geometry related library. While the library can't implement
all possible data structures in this field it can (and should) define
concepts and interfaces allowing future extensions while maintaining
interoperability.

- In addition to that the reviewers made a lot of remarks related to
different smaller inconsistencies part of which already have been addressed
during the review. Barend has a full list of the remaining ones and promised
to address all of them.

Last but not least I would like to encourage cooperation between the authors
of this library and the author of Boost.Polygon as both libraries have their
strength' worth combining. In an ideal world and at some point I would like
to see both libraries to be merged. But this is obviously not something to
expect really soon.

At this point I would like to thank all who participated in the review and,
certainly, the authors for submitting this excellent library to Boost.

Regards Hartmut
GGL Review Manager

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http://boostcon.com

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