Paul Giaccone wrote:
Excellent, Beth, good job! This is just the sort of thing I had in mind and would have done if other constraints on my time had permitted. Thank you! I hope this or something very similar will be put somewhere prominently on the Boost website as I think it will be a very valuable asset for both potential and existing users.
Thanks, Paul. Any chance that we could pool our limited time resources to get this done? I'm still hoping that if we could get the groupings nailed down with good names and descriptions and the libraries properly sorted among them, others would contribute individual library descriptions. Without that additional help, I'm afraid the job would just be too large. With some of the libraries -- particularly the ones I listed under "Advanced Utilities" and "Bleeding Edge" -- it would take some time just to get up to speed on the concepts behind them, not to mention learning enough about the library itself to describe it intelligently. Others like threading or the BGL, I'm somewhat familiar with, but someone with more experience with those types of libraries could better judge which features are most important to potential users. The groupings should probably be done first, because different types of descriptions are appropriate to different groups. For example, descriptions for "Tweaks" (or "Enhancements", if people prefer), should describe the problem they solve (memory leaks, bad casts, etc), while Simple Utilities would just describe what the functions do, and General Libraries would be mostly a features list to help people quickly decide whether the Boost implementation is worth investigating. The more clearly we can specify the types of descriptions we need, the more forthcoming contributions are likely to be. Asking someone to describe the serialization library in a few sentences can be a little intimidating. Listing its major features doesn't seem so hard.