On 13/05/15 01:55 PM, Niall Douglas wrote:
On 13 May 2015 at 12:37, Stefan Seefeld wrote:
On 13/05/15 12:19 PM, Niall Douglas wrote:
Personally speaking, I think the new library authors are overwhelmingly voting for a complete break with Boost 1.x. It makes no sense to bundle these new libraries into a 1.x monolithic distro when they have no dependencies on Boost.
I believe now is the time we start establishing the infrastructure to shape the new Boost 2.0 distro instead of wasting resources on trying to refactor the 1.x distro. APIBind is there for maintainers wanting to be part of both distros. Let's make a clean break. Allow me to bring up a point I have been trying to make for quite a while: Why does Boost need a single "distro" ? Under my scheme, a Boost 2.0 distro is merely when one presses "Download All" and it downloads each of the individual standalone distros for each Boost 2.0 library.
Sounds great.
Assuming a full breakup of boost libraries with well documented (and encoded) dependencies among them, I think a much more viable solution for everyone would be to let each boost library become its own project with its own release schedule etc. Already there. APIBind makes it easier to iterate versions of a library without breaking dependent libraries who can remain bound to earlier versions. All in the same translation unit.
Sounds useful. But "Already there" surely is somewhat of an overstatement. :-) For once, each of those stand-alone library projects needs a way to be built stand-alone, against already installed prerequisite libraries. (I'm right now experimenting with getting boost.python to that point, and I have asked for some help on boost.build. I'm not sure how long it will take, and how much work will be involved, to get us there...
So Boost would be merely an umbrella organization, and what you call a distro may be the repository of Boost libraries.
Wouldn't that be something worthwhile to think about and discuss ? Already there. The web service dashboard I mentioned would let users select what ordering criteria to rank the dashboard. You then press download to download whichever libraries you want.
That sounds all good. But again, here we are only talking about technical solutions, while the real questions are non-technical (organizational, administrative, cultural, ...) Stefan -- ...ich hab' noch einen Koffer in Berlin...