In the beginning, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, documentation consisted of each library having a heap of .html files in its directory, following no convention in either naming or placement. So there was no way to have a separate tarball with the docs, but there wasn't any need either, because Boost was much smaller.

Does that mean that dinosaurs still roam around here? :) Is there any reason as of today to keep doing it? (other than no-one volunteering to make the change). I guess there must be, since we have separate no-docs GitHub releases. Regards, Ruben.

can use an archive that is smaller (because it contains no documentation)

There is an idea that we have started experimenting with, going even further than skipping html docs compilation. - delete the entire doc/ folder, from every library. - remove the test/ folder from each library. - remove the example/ folder from each library. In other words, only important C++ "source" code such as include/ and src/ would remain. Technical feedback is welcome. Do you believe this is untenable or would cause problems for users? Deleting the above mentioned directories breaks compilation in certain cases. It must be investigated further.

How much does this gain?

Tested a few months ago. Don't have the exact numbers, but I think the archives were 50% smaller. You are right, focusing on doc/ might be enough. Still, if other folders can be removed, and not lose functionality...

On Fri, May 24, 2024 at 2:57 PM Andrey Semashev via Boost < boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:

Removing docs is mostly acceptable since they are available online

Well... I don't think removing them completely is a great idea. Instead, the Boost release could consist of two separate archives. One with the documentation, and the other with everything else. And if these two archives are unpacked into the same directory, the result is the same as when unpacking an all-in-one archive. Thanks

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. If both of the above choices exist, and are available as releases (source-only, and full), then this may be the sweet spot of complexity. It answer the needs of basically everyone, while only requiring one additional bundle. On Thu, Jun 6, 2024 at 2:46 PM Andrey Semashev via Boost < boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:

On 6/6/24 20:26, Vinnie Falco wrote:

...

On Fri, May 24, 2024 at 2:57 PM Andrey Semashev via Boost mailto:boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:

Removing docs is mostly acceptable since they are available online

Well... I don't think removing them completely is a great idea.

Right, to be clear, I didn't suggest to completely remove them from downloads. I'm just saying that an archive without the docs would make sense - in addition to an archive that contains docs (whether it is a full package with sources or just the docs).

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On Thu, Jun 6, 2024 at 5:51 PM Andrey Semashev via Boost wrote:

Perhaps, we could publish three variants: full, source-only (which includes tests and examples but not docs) and minimal (which only includes library sources)?

While it would be interesting to publish source (boost-dev) and docs (boost-docs) archives separately (and other variations thereof)... I would prefer if we instead expend effort into entirely automating and securing the current release archives and process before branching out. -- -- René Ferdinand Rivera Morell -- Don't Assume Anything -- No Supone Nada -- Robot Dreams - http://robot-dreams.net

On Jun 7, 2024, at 00:56, Sam Darwin via Boost wrote:

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.

Last I looked, there were some jpeg image files in there, some a few megabytes large.