On Wednesday 31 December 2014 17:28:36 Peter Dimov wrote:
Typically, when some library is installed in, say, $LIB, its headers reside in $LIB/include and its .a/.lib files in $LIB/lib. Our libraries, when built, go to $BOOST/stage/lib, which is close enough. But our header directory is just $BOOST, which doesn't seem right, as the whole of Boost is accessible through it.
It makes sense, at least to me, to have the headers in $BOOST/include/boost, instead of just $BOOST/boost. The transition to Git would have been a good time to switch to that - there were enough other changes to the structure.
I'm not saying that we should switch right away or something like that, but am I the only one to whom such a switch (at some unspecified time in the future) seems a good idea?
I think, in far perspective we should be moving away from the common $BOOST_ROOT/boost directory and binding libraries together via -I compiler switches. Note that this does not mean that there will be no such common directory in users' setups. The equivalent of 'make install' or package installation can (and I'm sure will, at least for some time) form the boost directory with all public headers. The location of this directory is system-specific.