Stefan Seefeld wrote:
I'm asking whether a specific use-case that is obviously important to me (and to many others I gather, even though few people express it the way I do) could be supported.
What I use is this: https://github.com/boostorg/system/blob/develop/.travis.yml#L288 This is not quite what you want, because it doesn't use the system-installed Boost, it git clones one. But it only clones the minimum subset necessary for the tests (of, in this case, Boost.System) to run. Now admittedly in Boost.System's case this is just $ python tools/boostdep/depinst/depinst.py system Installing module core Installing module predef Installing module winapi Installing module assert Installing module config taking 4 seconds, and in Boost.Python's case you'll need much more than that. But it's (a) still not the whole Boost and (b) is only dependent on what you #include, not on Boost's overall size. Appendix A, Boost.Python test dependencies: C:\Projects\boost-git\boost>dist\bin\boostdep --test python Test dependencies for python: assert bind config conversion core detail foreach function graph integer iterator lexical_cast mpl numeric~conversion preprocessor property_map smart_ptr static_assert tuple type_traits utility throw_exception (from conversion) typeof (from conversion) range (from foreach) move (from function) type_index (from function) algorithm (from graph) any (from graph) array (from graph) bimap (from graph) concept_check (from graph) disjoint_sets (from graph) functional (from graph) graph_parallel (from graph) math (from graph) multi_index (from graph) optional (from graph) parameter (from graph) property_tree (from graph) random (from graph) regex (from graph) serialization (from graph) spirit (from graph) test (from graph) tti (from graph) unordered (from graph) xpressive (from graph) function_types (from iterator) fusion (from iterator) container (from lexical_cast) predef (from mpl) mpi (from property_map) exception (from algorithm) lambda (from bimap) (unknown) (from container) intrusive (from container) dynamic_bitset (from graph_parallel) filesystem (from graph_parallel) variant (from graph_parallel) atomic (from math) format (from property_tree) system (from random) io (from serialization) endian (from spirit) iostreams (from spirit) locale (from spirit) phoenix (from spirit) pool (from spirit) proto (from spirit) thread (from spirit) timer (from test) winapi (from system) chrono (from thread) date_time (from thread) ratio (from chrono) tokenizer (from date_time) rational (from ratio)