On Thu, Sep 18, 2014 at 11:14 AM, Niall Douglas
On 18 Sep 2014 at 11:01, Stephen Kelly wrote:
But, I guess you're saying 'for me it's a non-goal'.
No,
Let me rephrase. The download link on boost.org takes me to a page where I can download all-of-boost.zip. My question was whether it should be a goal for it to offer boost-static_assert.zip.
Your response was along the lines of 'it doesn't matter to me what the download link on boost.org does. Here is my solution...', or with a different paraphrase 'what you describe is not a goal for me. My goal is...'.
Or you're saying you want the download link on boost.org to point to your tool?
Oh now I see what you're saying. You're saying that the git submodule boost.thread should be separately downloadable as boost-thread.zip right?
From a user perspective, I would really like something like this: http://jqueryui.com/download/
This Jquery UI "download builder" compiles a zip for your selected modules and automatically includes their dependencies in it. If at a later stage you decide need additional modules then the easiest thing is to get a new full download and not merge an incremental download. Perhaps another user experience enhancement would be to have precompiles binaries. When I get boost I don't worry about the size of the donwload, but more about the compilation process that needs to follow. But I think the modularization is not just for user experience. Decoupling modules should improve maintainability -more atention is paid to interfaces between them-. Another aspect is about identity: A monolithic products gets the quality experience of its weakest chain. If e.g. some submodule have minimalistic documentation then use users get the feeling that the documentation of boost as a whole is not very extensive. The same goed for relevance. Some modules are very relevant and others are not very usefull for some users. Having a lot of modules packed as a single entity gives a feeling that there is a big learning curve you'l have to take. Knowing that there are standalone modules takes away that feeling somewhat.