Re: [boost] Boost is supposed to serve *the entire C++ community; it isn't Boost's goal to serve Boost's community*

On Friday, 20 May 2016 11:44:30 MSK Daniel James wrote:

On 19 May 2016 at 23:35, Stefan Seefeld wrote:

...

Fedora has been doing the same for many years. In fact, I'm not aware of any Linux distro that doesn't ship individual Boost libraries, which is why I have been promoting to do this modularization "inhouse", to avoid to put that burden on package maintainers, and different distros to vary slightly in their way to implement this, causing headaches for users on those platforms.

OK, so any ideas how to do that? I assume they don't need separate tarballs, so maybe just some description of how to build libraries, which binaries require other binaries, and which files go into which package?

With regard to binaries, most of the information they already have. E.g. the dependencies are encoded into binaries themselves (Debian helper is able to translate that information into package dependencies; not sure about rpm or other build scripts). In Debian, they just know which libraries produce binaries and package these into separate packages. There are also special cases like Boost.Python, which has to be built multiple times - for each supported python version. I don't think we can provide any additional information to cover those special cases. It's the headers that pose the major difficulty, since there is no easy way to discover what library (package) a header belongs to or dependencies between them. Remember that we distribute Boost as an archive with monolithic include structure.