On 5 Dec 2014 at 11:24, Robert Ramey wrote:
I imagine, when Boost gets truly modular, one would download sources of the needed libraries separately,
That is explicitly a non-goal for Boost.
The problem is that this is a lot harder than it looks. It's much more than cleaning up dependencies. Proposals to achieve this - to the extent that they can be characterized as proposals - have been incomplete, impractible and/or unconvincing. I firmly believe that we want to do this and are on the path to doing so.
I think that statement poorly phrased when we have a fully functional and proven working modular Boost proposal in BindLib. It's just a few libraries supporting it yet, but I claim you cannot call this "unconvincing" when it works right here and now. Want to test my proposed solution for modular Boost right now? Do this from a VS2015 CTP [1] command box: git clone https://github.com/BoostGSoC13/boost.afio.git cd boost.afio git checkout develop git submodule update --init --recursive git clone https://github.com/chriskohlhoff/asio.git cl /Zi /EHs /Oy- /Ob0 /MD /RTC1 /GF /GR /Gy /bigobj /wd4503 /Zc:forScope /Zc:wchar_t /W3 test\test_all.cpp detail\SpookyV2.cpp /DUNICODE=1 /DWIN32=1 /D_UNICODE=1 /D_WIN32=1 /Iinclude /Itest /DAFIO_STANDALONE=1 /DASIO_STANDALONE=1 /Iasio/asio/include /DSPINLOCK_STANDALONE=1 /DBOOST_AFIO_RUNNING_IN_CI=1 ... and it should hopefully spit out a test_all.exe which has not a single Boost dependency in it, despite being a 100% Boost library and still written to use Boost.Test, Boost.Config, Boost.Thread and so on. I stitched that together from my test config here so it may be slightly off, but it definitely works. I am going to set up Jenkins CI testing for standalone builds later today. [1]: Only VS2015 CTP currently has a working Filesystem TS. If you use VS2013 or GCC or clang it'll need to link in Boost.Filesystem. Niall -- ned Productions Limited Consulting http://www.nedproductions.biz/ http://ie.linkedin.com/in/nialldouglas/