Re: [boost] Boost is supposed to serve *the entire C++ community; it isn't Boost's goal to serve Boost's community*

On 20/05/2016 01:35, Stefan Seefeld wrote:

On 19.05.2016 18:13, Daniel James wrote:

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On 19 May 2016 at 17:25, M.A. van den Berg wrote:

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I also like “sudo apt-get”, and I also like the it pulls in all the things you need and not having to worry about things, that’s exactly what I would love to see.

The Debian package manager however does not download the whole repository of all debian packages, instead it models package dependencies and download the dependency tree. Debian's great. As far as I know, it's the only modularization of boost in use, and it's been working well for years, so I think it'd be a good model for us to base our efforts on. I suspect having a smaller number of modules helps usability as well.

Fedora has been doing the same for many years. In fact, I'm not aware of any Linux distro that doesn't ship individual Boost libraries, which is why I have been promoting to do this modularization "inhouse", to avoid to put that burden on package maintainers, and different distros to vary slightly in their way to implement this, causing headaches for users on those platforms.

I think the reference to modularization in Debian is slightly misleading. Each component with separately compiled libraries become a separate package. The header-only libraries are all inside a single package, libboost-dev or something like that. It's not like you can separately install boost.any -- Vladimir Prus http://vladimirprus.com