On Thursday 29 May 2014 22:22:05 Julian Gonggrijp wrote:
PROPOSAL
The following (evolutionary) global changes to Boost should be planned and given priority over any other proposals [e.g. 5], in the following order:
1. Reduction of dependencies between Boost libraries.
Agree, to a reasonable point. I don't think that solid libraries should be torn apart or unrelated components of different libraries should be mixed together just to reduce dependencies. The cases where this would be beneficial should be discussed with library maintainers. I think that notion of optional dependencies it also needed to achieve this goal. There are multiple places in Boost where dependencies are intentionally loosened but formally exist.
2. Simple but effective automation of dependency handling.
Taking into account your reply to Stefan, I agree that a tool for selectively downloading a subset of Boost is needed.