On 8/09/2017 14:21, Florian Lindner wrote:
I really love to use boost libraries in my project, but I always wonder, for such an accomplished project, why is the documentation so bad?
In many cases, probably the same reason any other technical documentation is bad -- it is written by the original developer/maintainer, who has a mental model of how everything fits together and on occasion will omit things because they don't realise what sort of questions people will have or that what seems self-evident to them might not be to others. I'm sure pull requests with suggested improvements would be welcomed.
I want to get familiar with http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_65_1/libs/ptr_container/. What do I need to include? Neiter the tutorial, the reference or the usage guidelines mention a #include line. This is something which stroke me quite often at various boost libs. This is one of the older libraries in Boost, which might be a factor.
Most Boost libraries provide a single "master" header file which you can
include to get all components of the library, and this is the typical
usage when getting started. You might later narrow to a subset once you
know exactly which parts you want to use -- and generally your IDE can
then help you locate which specific subfiles they're in.
Unfortunately different Boost libraries have different conventions for
the name of this master header file, but generally one of the following
will do the trick:
*