Steven Watanabe wrote:
If we're going to have to modify everything anyway, we might as well give up on making the changes incremental.
I don't consider all modifications equally disqualifying. Adding project : requirements <library>/boost/headers ; to all test Jamfiles is indeed a global change, but it's mechanistic and does not require any further maintenance, so it's not going to be a burden for the maintainer of the library. Adding a build/Jamfile with the dependencies, on the other hand, both requires getting the dependencies correct and keeping them correct, so it does impose an additional responsibility on the maintainer. (It also may have packaging implications downstream... and if we don't magically solve cycles, those are going to be a problem too.) The idea of being "incremental" is to allow those maintainers who would like to accept the additional responsibility to be able to do so, and to allow those who would rather not, to, well, not. This is not invalidated by our adding a line to their Jamfiles - once, without them needing to do anything about it.