El 24/05/2020 a las 17:04, Paul A Bristow via Boost escribió:
Your epoch ideas have merit, but some disadvantages.
But I fear that (like other projects like Cmake) the BIG hurdle that we struggle to get over, is *resources*.
And particularly, resources to update *all* existing libraries in any way.
Boost does have a lot of dependencies, but they are there for excellent reasons.
Documentation is a big part of the distribution (guilty) , but are needed by most.
Tests and tests data are another area that many users rarely use, but separately them would be a big task.
It is true that Boost has become very big, but Boost is only taking up space on builder's disks, not in end-users executables.
If we could do something positive, it would be to make much clearer that nearly all Boost is header-only, and has no effect on the executables.
The Getting Started instructions have been poor from the start, and are virtually unchanged while the Boost size has increased >10-fold.
To suggest that everyone needs to build all the libraries for all the variants taking hours has become absurd when most users are only like to need a handful like system and chrono.
So we could and should *sell* Boost much better.
I agree with much of what you say here, in particular with your appreciation that Boost has a PR problem. Most Boost libs are indeed header-only, which dispenses many users with the need of building. But even in this case one has to drag a lot of dependencies in. Users are comparing Boost (fairly or not) with header-only libs without any dependency whatsoever.
In conclusion, I don't think that we have the resources to do any useful split.
So while we may regret that some avoid Boost, we must resign ourselves to continue muddling through ☹
I'd say at least phases 0 and 1 of the proposed plan for this: https://github.com/joaquintides/boost_epoch/#work-plan are fairly economical in terms of needed effort. Once put in place, it'll all of course depend on how this actually incentivizes authors to do their part. Joaquín M López Muñoz