Rhys Ulerich wrote:
A couple of months some of us suggested a change of mission, for boost to become something akin to the apache foundation, i.e. an umbrella organization for (mostly) independent projects.
... we should also take into account the difficultly we cause distributions.
A potentially interesting model/solution might be for Boost to become Apache-like and also to follow Eclipse's multiple simultaneous release cycle idea (e.g. Eclipse Ganymede, Galileo, etc.). Individual contributing subprojects release on whatever timescale is appropriate for them, but periodically the whole foundation makes a push and releases a cohesive, comparatively well tested, longer lived collection of the subprojects in a single release. The distributions could better plan around such multiple simultaneous releases.
This model has worked extremely well for the open source and commercial needs of the Eclipse folks.
Yes, this certainly has benefits. But note that separately-installable Eclipse components are relatively large -- generally much larger than a boost library. Also, there's relatively simple dependency structure. Together, that makes release engineering less hard. - Volodya