Re: [boost] CMake Announcement from Boost Steering Committee

On Thu, Jul 27, 2017 at 10:30 AM, Edward Diener via Boost wrote:

On 7/27/2017 11:28 AM, Gary Furnish via Boost wrote:

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On Thu, Jul 27, 2017 at 8:40 AM, Rene Rivera via Boost wrote:

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Since you are making a variety of accusations..

On Wed, Jul 26, 2017 at 11:01 PM, Gary Furnish via Boost < boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:

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I've observed from the outside that basically no one was ever going to touch boost.build because the people who like it (who happen to be single points of failure for the entire boost ecosystem) basically out-shouted everyone whenever a technical discussion came up.

Prove it.

Sure. See the discussions where if you aren't doing things the boost-build way and are instead a config-per-directory way your basically considered a second class citizen in spite of that being the way the rest of the oss world works.

Please give a URL to these discussions you are citing. Granted that Boost Build creates output in a different structure than CMake does, where you get the rest of your complaint I do not know.

I don't have a specific discussion so much as the feeling that in discussions leading up to the SC there was a very us against them mentality on the part of people who like boost.build. Its not a very welcoming place to comment as a user/minor bug fix contributor.

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The fact that it is still non-obvious how to do this without touching anything besides a build directory is awful. This should be somewhere in big bold letters.

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Its not like there haven't been concerns about boost.build for years.

All build systems, heck all software, has "concerns".

Yes but the issues that I'm talking about are things that have been an issue for years and never got fixed. See also silently dropping flags if you use a space and don't quote in bjam files (something also not obvious and yet important to pass compiler flags!). At least CMAKE/most sane build systems will put up errors somewhere along the lines.

Are these so-called issues documented anywhere in Boost Trac ? Have PRs been created for these issues ? Have these issues been discussed on the Boost mailing lists ? If so, please cite where.

I have no idea, but I know that they come up enough that build questions are pretty persistent on stack overflow compared to other c++ software in my opinion. Boost has by far the hardest to understand system as a user of anything I've dealt with, including setting up cross compiling gcc which is no picnic. I have seen the whitespace issue dismissed as intended behavior because of the way the lexer works in a thread at one point, but its an intended behavior that is very user unfriendly.

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Its not like the documentation for boost.build wasn't basically "ask the mailing list or prey someone else has asked stack overflow" for years.

The documentation is bad compared to what other documentation?

The documentation is bad compared to say, CMAKE, which isn't great in the first place.

CMake docs are just a list of various subjects without any overviews of how to use anything. I do not call that better than Boost Build, and I do not thing that Boost Build documentation is great either. Yes but plenty of people have written CMake tutorials. Boost.build not so much.

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Setting up an out of build directory has always been a pain with poorly documented flags needing to be invoked to share a common source directory (and its worth noting that I'm not sure its technically parallel safe in any reasonable way given the need to bootstrap and create header links and what not).

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Its not like every time a new version of MSVC beta comes out boost.build doesn't break and its not a priority because the maintainers of boost.build don't use MSVC.

Prove that it wasn't a priority. Considering that the last Boost release was delayed precisely to support MSVC building.

It was delayed to support the final release. CMAKE supported it from the first beta. Given that MSVC is specifically making an effort to implement features to be part of the standards process, this is basically a choice between using boost or being on MSVC's and C++ cutting edge. Support for MSVC has basically always been this bad as far as I remember. It should have never been necessary to delay a release to support a key platform when there were four betas.

Four betas that were in constant flux but you think that it is up to Boost to constantly follow VC++'s changes as they roll out a new release over an extended time period. Boost has constantly gone out of its way to accommodate Microsoft and VC++. Any breakage that occurs is because VC++ has always been behind gcc and clang as far as C++ standards compliance. Needless to say the VC++ preprocessor has never been C++ standards compliant and lack of such things like two-phase lookup has repeatedly broken C++ standards compliance in the sort of corner cases which advanced C++ code as evidenced by Boost libraries entails. You are way out of line on this item. If you had any real knowledge of Boost library code you would know that the vast majority of one-off fixes are for the VC++ compilers. That has certainly improved with the latest VC++ release(s), but to say that Boost does not and has not gone out of its way tro accommodate VC++ is just wrong.

Honestly standards compliance errors are great, I can fix those locally. If I could persistently get to those I would be happy. What has always been a problem is when feature detection or compiler detection goes wrong, and everything blows up before I even get a chance to find real errors. This is a design flaw. If MSVC next version comes out, I should at least be able to try to build what worked last version.

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Its not like everyone submitting to boost doesn't complain about having to learn a non-standard build system that isn't documented richly enough to write scripts from scratch.

Again, prove it.

I've seen a number of emails here where people basically said "and then I had to learn this extra crazy language to get stuff into boost." I'm not sure why this is a contentious point. By definition you have to learn an entire new build system to get something into boost. Is there a simple "and this is what you need to do to build a new module in boost webpage?" No there isn't. There never has been.

I agree with this. For potential library developers there should have been a web page for setting up Boost Build to build, test, and possibly write docs for a Boost library. Either that or this "use cases" methodology for library developers should have been a prominent part of the Boost Build docs.

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These are not new problems. I am *really* glad that SC did something because in my mind it means boost won't die a slow death to just posting independent libs on github.

Prove that the build system is the reason Boost is "dying a slow death"? For that matter prove that Boost is dying in the first place.

How many of the latest proposals for C++ have actually been in boost? Ranges? Polymorphic allocators? I can not remember the last time I watched a CPPCON/etc video and someone was talking about bringing something from boost into the standard library besides filesystem (which is legacy) or asio (which technically is standalone).

How many new libraries do you think that the C++ standards committee ever accepts into the C++ standard ? Very, very few out of all the potential libraries in Boost or otherwise that might come to their attention. The real test is whether C++ developers rely on any of the 130+ libraries under the Boost umbrella. I think quite a few still do.

Maybe, but the more non-standardish things that have to be done the more you put on peoples plates... (I think its interesting GSL got done under non-boost header too given that boost seems to be the perfect place to have put/used that).

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Note.. Yes I will keep posting in these threads in response to false accusations to the decades of work some of us have put into Boost.

Standing here and shouting at users for for making "false accusations" when they have real, specific issues with boost is not a way to make boost look friendly or the place to contribute to.

No one is shouting. It certainly feels like some people are not very friendly on the issue. I realize that's a feeling, but the mailing list is not exactly a friendly place sometimes for people who aren't in the core-dev crowd. It is a give-and-take discussion. I for one am satisfied that if the Boost Steering Committee want to change to CMake that is fine and Boost needs to do so to accommodate C++ developers and end-users who are more used to CMake and its ways of doing things.

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-- -- Rene Rivera -- Grafik - Don't Assume Anything -- Robot Dreams - http://robot-dreams.net -- rrivera/acm.org (msn) - grafikrobot/aim,yahoo,skype,efnet,gmail

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