On 12/6/2014 8:46 AM, Stephen Kelly wrote:
Edward Diener wrote:
I believe that Boost should pursue the goal of allowing individual libraries to be downloaded and used without having to download the complete Boost structure.
That would be nice :).
If enough people agree on a particular solution it can be done by those people.
That's not how Boost works. Boost libraries and decisions related to them are owned by the maintainer of the library. There is no 'enough people' who could decide to split the parts of Boost.Serialization which depend on Boost.Spirit away from the rest of the library, for example. Robert doesn't want that, so it won't happen. Decisions are not made as a community. That's how Boost works. 'Enough people' is not a factor. Am I wrong?
You are right that you can't force a particular library's maintenance team to do something. That does not necessarily mean that people would not come together to make changes benefitting Boost in general.
2) Allowing individual libraries to be used, rather than current monolithic Boost, is being done for the end-user community. We need to make the goal that the way of doing this is as simple for the end-user as possible
That would be nice :).
I don't see how it is possible without changing the Boost model of 'each individual maintainer decides, always'.
If such rules were adopted you'd have to make it clear what the implications of having such a goal are.
They are simply programmers wanting to use individual Boost libraries for their programming efforts.
Are you sure users want to use individual libraries? Do you see calls for that from users?
I have seen the calls for that from users. The general objection is that downloading/installing monolithic Boost when only a few libraries are needed "seems" wrong.
After which people who are interested can discuss the proposals and try to see if there is one that meets a fairly large consensus. If that is the case, then those who are part of that consensus can work together to make it happen.
Are you suggesting the result of such consensus would be forced on Boost maintainers independent of what they may want? That would seem to be a break from the current model of how Boost works.
No. I still believe that things can be done by consensus. Recently a 'meta' directory with some information was added to all Boost libraries. I did not see any uprising against this. So clearly it is possible.