[Sending this reply to list as opposed to personal email]
On Wed, Mar 4, 2020 at 3:39 PM Richard Hodges
On Wed, 4 Mar 2020 at 13:25, Andrey Semashev
wrote: On Wed, Mar 4, 2020 at 1:50 PM Richard Hodges via Boost
wrote: Why just MySQL?
Getting something useful released is more important than getting something perfect released.
If Ruben has a ready-to-go solution for MySQL, why not make it available to users?
Making it available to users is not the same as making it part of Boost. Boost is known for general purpose libraries, as well as more domain-focused solutions, but it is not a place for wrappers around specific other libraries. Let alone, when the said libraries already have C/C++ API.
Boost also has mpi, regex, asio::ssl and python. What are these if not wrappers around common c libraries?
I'm not sure about Boost.MPI, but I thought it was not a wrapper of a single library, but of a standard API that can be implemented by different libraries. Boost.Regex is not a wrapper at all; it implements regular expressions from scratch. asio::ssl is not a library but a plugin for Boost.ASIO that provides one small piece of functionality compared to the rest of the library. Boost.Python is probably closest to an exception, although it is a binding to another language (not a library), which arguably only has one C API and implementation. Yes, there is CPython, but I don't believe it offers a C API.
It can always be complemented or extended with Oracle, SQLite, ODBC etc etc later.
If the proposed library offers a stable and flexible API that can be backed by multiple implementations then by all means - that would be a very interesting proposal indeed. But the author has to demonstrate that the proposed user API can in fact be supported by more than one backend, so at least two backends need to be presented, and preferably with guidelines and infrastructure for adding more.
Mpi, regex and python would dispute this arbitrary restriction.
I don't think so, as per above.
Boost suffers from a lack of contribution. Is there any value in making contribution difficult?
I don't think the amount of contributions by itself is the goal. There has to be value associated with the contribution. I just don't think a C++ wrapper of a specific library has enough value.