Re: [boost] Moving away from SourceForge

On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 2:43 AM, Olaf van der Spek wrote:

On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 4:21 AM, Tom Kent wrote:

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On Tue, Jan 24, 2017 at 3:42 PM, Diego Rodriguez-Losada < diego.rlosada@gmail.com> wrote:

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Just a question (from my ignorance), why the 1.5Gb msvc-all archive? The download stats clearly show a high preference for specific installers, maybe that one could be dropped without much impact.

There are lots of use cases where users will need multiple different versions of the libraries. Commonly, both the 32 and 64 bit version of a single visual studio type. However, if you are building a library for distribution, you will probably want to support multiple versions of visual studio with your library, so you'll need the boost libraries for all those.

The lack of a package that supported all the different versions is what originally drove me to start volunteering to do the windows builds...I'd really like to see it stick around :-)

Why is building from source not an option?

It is definitely an option, I often recommend it to people because it isn't very hard (a couple extra dependencies and a new tool to learn, but I'm not being sarcastic when I say it isn't hard). However that isn't how windows development often happens. I know that where I work, we have static libs pre-built for all our dependencies. Then when a developer makes a build of the product, they just link in all those dependencies. Tom