On 6/7/24 00:56, Sam Darwin wrote:
The current release processes are designed to generate full archives, and it is convenient to keep this as one of potentially many build options. They are permanent archive records of a complete boost release. They can be deployed on the website, as-is. Scripts don't need to change. Any long-time boost users who might expect this choice, may still access it, the same as before. The explanation is clear to advertise: full downloads.
The next choice: minimal, fast, source-only. This may become the new default "source-only". A question is whether test/ and example/ should also be removed. I did try compiling this, and it appeared to succeed. The result was around 25% of the previous size. That's quite an improvement.
I think, an archive that includes at least tests is useful for third party CI. And some libraries also build examples as part of their test suites, so those should be included as well. Perhaps, we could publish three variants: full, source-only (which includes tests and examples but not docs) and minimal (which only includes library sources)?