I've been looking at the question of "dependencies" and I would like to know a little more about how they are generated. I've looked at: a) http://www.pdimov.com/tmp/report-6d1f271/serialization.html b) http://www.steveire.com/boost/2014sept16_serialization.png c) bcp documentation And it doesn't seem that they all produce the same list of dependencies. a) doesn't include any *.cpp files. So I assume that it contains less than the true number of dependencies. That is if a *.cpp file includes a header as part of it's implementation and not it's interface, it wouldn't be included. b) produces a very intimidating graph. I'm not sure what the rules are for it's generation. I'm guessing that it uses dependencies at the library level rather than the *.cpp level which might make things look worse than they are. c) BCP seems pretty exhaustive in that it cans all the code in all the *.cpp libraries, tests, examples etc. For lots of applications - e.g. if I wanted to include a boost library with my application but not all the tests, It would generate a likely much larger subset than I need. But maybe not. If my application includes the boost library.dll then I guess I have to include it all. This raises an interesting question to me. Suppose I want to distribute my app with source and I include a CMake which just doesn't build the libraries but just includes the relevant *.cpp files in the application build itself? This would make my application depend upon the smallest subset of boost possible. What would it take to make a version of BCP which, given an arbitrary group of source files, returns a list of headers and *.cpp files which could be used to build the app? We know from an intuitive basis that we want to give the option of delivering a smaller boost, but we've always thought that that means delivering a library subset. Is this really what we want? What would users do with the smaller subset? (Besides complain that its not small enough?) How about if we tweaked BCP to deliver just a subset of files relevant to the target? Would that make them happier? Would it get us off the hook for trying to "solve" what the dependencies are? Just thinking out loud here. Robert Ramey -- View this message in context: http://boost.2283326.n4.nabble.com/questions-regarding-dependency-reports-s-... Sent from the Boost - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.