This may have been discussed earlier and been proved impractical or impossible. I'm a big fan of the boost library; high-quality; great utility; great range. What's not to like? Unfortunately while I've been trying to introduce boost at the places I've been working on I find that the sheer scope of the boost library makes it discouraging. Often it's desirable to just demand a certain compiler and build enviroment (gcc or Visual Studio) then the developers run check out from subversion (for instance) and run the build script and they are on the way. boost isn't as easy as it could be IMO (due to its size and scope) to include into an existing project with many developers (many who might be unwilling to receive something that complicate the build enviroment). So let's take the project I'm working on now as an example. What I would like to do is just to download and use the smart pointers in boost to introduce the other developers to the possibility of reusing high-quality smart pointers instead of writing your own or worse not use smart pointers at all. In my world I would then like to download the smart pointer boost package (with dependencies?) which should be a fairly small download. Due to a more manageable size I would then foresee that it would easier for me to get it into the source control system and into the build environment. Also, it would be easier for me to convince the systems architect that boost is worth more than the hassle it introduces (right now I can't). Later when people see the benefit of boost and we want to do some text parsing I'd like to download the boost.spirit package and set it up. And so on. I would also think that packaging boost in different packages (a small base package and then perhaps each individual library as a package) would give benefits to the development of the new releases. Right now I have the feeling that getting a new release is rather daunting task. Which I guess comes from boost being a monolithic, large library that supports many different compilers and platforms. By packaging boost into several different packages one could perhaps have different release schedules for different packages? Different supported compilers on different packages ( ie VC6 I guess is a pain to get working with mpl but shared_ptr<> should work rather straightforward with that aging but still widely used compiler)? What do you think? I realize that this would be a rather daunting task in itself (impossible?) since I guess that the dependencies between the different libraries in boost might not be 100% documented and well understood. I do however think that there would be benefits in terms of spreading the popularity of boost and managing boost releases if it could be done. Regards, Mårten Rånge