On 1/05/2023 03:19, Peter Dimov wrote:

Robert Ramey wrote:

...

The basic question that occurs to me is "is this library worth maintaining and keeping in boost". If dropping the library would break a lot of users code, then the answer is an easy yes. If dropping the library would result in breaking no code - the answer is an easy no. Otherwise it's a judgement call we can argue about. But in order to do this we need to know the answer the question: "How much code would be broken if not in Boost. Hopefully this sheds light on this.

There's probably a way to answer the question "how many Debian (Ubuntu, Fedora...) packages would be broken if we remove library X from Boost", but I don't know what it is.

You could in principle trawl the package indexes and find how many packages have a direct dependency on "libboost-xyz" (or whatever the local package name for a specific library is), and then recursively work upwards by finding packages that depend on that package, etc. It's harder for the Boost libs that don't produce binary packages -- often there will be a dependency to a readme or something even when there isn't a binary, but not always. You *might* be able to narrow it down if the source packages declare a dependency on specific Boost library source packages rather than a monolithic libboost-dev, though.