Background

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### Background

Almost exactly a year ago, Joel de Guzman asked me to take on the lead maintenance of Boost Phoenix and I agreed to do so, not really knowing what I was taking on. In the first few months I fixed a lot of the things which could be fixed easily, while at the same time learning how to use git to keep things in order. Then things got tougher as I started to meet things which are not so easy to fix. I also found there were things I did not understand well enough.

At the end of 2014 I came back to the task anew. In the meantime I have learned a lot, particularly about Boost Fusion and Boost Proto which are used a lot by Boost Phoenix. I have also learned how to edit the QuickBooks files and regenerate them.

I have still not solved all the problems in Boost Phoenix. I think I am closing in on some of the remaining ones. I now know that some of the problems in Phoenix V3 were also present in Phoenix V2. This has changed the approach to how to solve them as I know that the problems cannot be in the use of Boost Proto as it was not used in V2.

I have made further progress during 2015 on understanding what the problems are and how to avoid them or work around them. That has given me the confidence to explore further applications of the code, which I expect will develop a lot in the next few months.

I want in this document to share some of what I have been doing and how I have solved some of the problems. One reason for doing this is that there may be other people who are considering taking on library maintenance of a library they did not themselves write. I hope I can make that easier for people to do.