Re: [boost] Lets do 1.70.1 WHO IS WITH ME!!!

On Sun, May 5, 2019 at 12:46 AM Rene Rivera wrote:

On Sat, May 4, 2019 at 10:00 PM James E. King III via Boost wrote:

...

I haven't seen a comprehensive plan put forth that would lead to modularization.

Some of us have worked for years in that direction, without the need for a formal plan. We're actually rather close.

To that end I started a discussion on Conan's github issues page to figure out how one could use it purely to download boost modules (and all their dependencies), and more importantly how to then use the downloaded bits with any build system (i.e. should be able to ask conan, "for this recipe, what are the include paths?", "for this recipe, what are the library paths and libraries?"). I'm not particularly interested in using conan as a build and packaging system for my own projects which already have their own, but to be able to leverage conan to download pre-built boost moduls and only the ones I need would be pretty cool. The ability to allow other build systems to run commands that download and find paths of dependencies would be really useful but I'm not sure conan does that. Another concern I have is that dependencies all seem to be manually managed right now for all of these third party systems. The recent cmake check-ins I have seen all have a manual set of module dependencies and I pushed back on this. Conan has their own list of dependencies; cmake has its own list of dependencies. I believe they all get their info from boostdep right now, which is good, but I think it is a manual consumption process for each release. Each boost repository should be able to automatically advertise the compile/runtime dependencies as well as the test-only dependencies. I slapped something together quickly this morning that helps visualize that (https://github.com/jeking3/boost-deptree), perhaps some of that type of logic could find its way into b2 so that b2 could automatically manage direct compile/runtime dependencies and direct test dependencies inside each project's meta directory? Then cmake, conan, and whatever else would be able to programmatically consume that data out of the repository it is trying to package or deliver. - JIm