On 1/31/2011 12:38 AM, Dave Abrahams wrote:
At Sun, 30 Jan 2011 22:06:07 -0500, Edward Diener wrote:
On this basis my own concern, whether a DVCS is used or not, is the dependencies between libraries.
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This means some way of incorporating version information in header files, some way of incorporating version information in shared libraries, some way of checking both transparently, and all of this must work in whatever environments a future individually distributed Boost targets.
Those are all "nice-to-haves" that are not practiced by the many other projects that include such dependency relationships. Care to design that system?
If this is not practiced by many other projects, perhaps that is because there are few other projects potentially seeking to deliver their libraries separately. But of course I think you are not entirely correct as the various problems of DLL dependencies on Windows and the tools on Linux to resolve dependencies when upgrading some application on Linux show. I would only seek to design such a system if there would be felt a need to do so by others also. In the face of "nobody else finds a need to do this so why should we" why would I expend my energy designing such a system or discussing it with others ? I will only offer that if Boost does in the future decide to deliver individual libraries rather than a single monolothic distribution as it does now, that end-users finding that library X version N.N does not work with library Y version N.N, of which it has a dependency relationship, will not be happy campers. If Boost developers think that is fine in such a system and that it is up to the end-users to figure out what works with what each time some upgraded library comes out, that is fine with me although I disagree that such a state of affairs would be good for Boost.