From: Beman Dawes [mailto:bdawes@acm.org] Sent: Thursday, January 23, 2003 02:50
At one time we published a header dependency chart, but as Boost grew it became unwieldy and we no longer produce it.
There have been past discussions on how to meet this need, and the consensus is that usually what is required is a library (rather than header) dependency analysis.
Yes, I agree, it is almost impossible considering which files to include and which not with the current size of the boost package. It is sensible to declare explicitely library dependencies (tree) and use them. Nevertheless, I created a perl script some time ago to display header and library dependencies in my library with references to boost headers. I hacked it quickly to work with boost only; if you are interested it is at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/boost/files/hdr_depend.
This would be fairly easy to produce, using a number of Boost's own libraries, of course:-)
But the holdup is that it is only a medium priority task, and lately has been pushed aside in favor of higher priority work. If someone else wants to take this one over, I'd be glad to hand it off. We want to do it entirely in C++, so any Booster can maintain it.
Well, currently I'm happily unpacking all boost but I like the idea; for example, for such a project I would like to use smart pointers only... I could spend some time on such a tool if anyone is interested, firstly gathering the requirements and then developing it. Ferda
--Beman