On 09/10/2018 23:08, Andrey Semashev via Boost wrote:
Library Test ------------ Should facilities for "testing" be only done by developers? or should users who acquire library packages also be able to test libraries.
I think, the ability to test libraries is essential for both Boost developers and users (primarily, developers, though). I think, potential solutions should include this functionality.
Should CMake testing results posting be used - CDASH?
I don't really know what CDash is, I've never used it.
It's a "dashboard" which displays submitted test results. It can be used to aggregate testing on multiple platforms. https://open.cdash.org/index.php?project=CMake is the dashboard for CMake itself. Boost could potentially use it, either the open dashboard or a self-hosted one, but it's strictly optional. Maybe Travis is sufficient, or you could integrate something else entirely.
Library Packaging ----------------- Is the library packaging facility provide by CMake - CPACK - useful to boost. Should boost libraries be updated to support it?
I would really like us to not get into the packaging business beyond preparing source packages of Boost releases. Packaging is a difficult topic, very target system dependent. Let the people who has the domain knowledge do it.
As someone who has built Debian packages of Boost for my project I can tell that it is unlikely that I would use CPack. Not because something is wrong with it (in fact, I've never had to use it, so I really don't know), but because the current building pipeline doesn't involve it and works backwards.
Last time I tried it, it was inferior to the native packaging tools. Particularly when packaging libraries, it didn't do as good a job with library version dependencies--if you build Debian packages on a non-Debian platform it can't compute the minimum library version from shlibs. I think it's primarily useful for packaging standalone applications where there are no complex library dependencies. Certainly for Windows and MacOS X it makes sense. For packaging a set of libraries like Boost, I don't think it's as useful; we already have good Boost packaging anyway, so I'd suggest ignoring it at least for now. Regards, Roger