On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 10:44 PM, Dave Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com> wrote:
on Thu Mar 15 2012, Beman Dawes <bdawes-AT-acm.org> wrote:
On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 5:54 PM, Dave Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com> wrote:
In my world there's no one central boost repo. There's an "official" repo for each individual project in Boost.
I have a worldview that goes like this:
There's an "official" repo for each individual project in Boost.
There is also a central boost repo, but it contains only the relatively few infrastructure files that apply to Boost as a whole, plus "references" to the official repos for the individual projects. The exact form of the "references" is immaterial to this world view, although certainly critical to the mechanics of how the central repo is used.
Is that just a slightly more detailed version of your worldview, or do you literally mean "no one central boost repo"?
I literally mean that, at least in the way I've been thinking of "one central boost repo."
If you literally mean that, I'm lost. How would any person or process know what's a part of Boost?
Certainly, we'll have to maintain a list of "references" delineating what's a part of Boost (e.g. like https://github.com/boost-lib/boost/tree/master/libs or http://gfxmonk.net/dist/0install/index/), and that list should be under source control somewhere, so you could think of that as central.
Yes, that's what I think of as the central repo. I.E. the root of the tree. Even if the only thing in it is a simple text file listing the URL's of the next level down repos, it still needs to be in a repo. At some point we might have several possibly overlapping trees, but there isn't any current plan to do so.
However, there's not necessarily any reason that list must be in the same repo as any of those few infrastructure files that apply to Boost as a whole, or that those files should necessarily be grouped together (i.e. we should feel free to determine the most appropriate repository boundaries), or that any user of Boost will need a working copy of the repository that maintains the list of references.
Important points. Understood.
You might well also think of the top-level Boost website material as "central," but that maybe ought not to go in the same repo as the list of references (or maybe not in any VCS repo–a database-backed CMS like Wordpress might be better). The point is, Boost itself may have several "central" repositories separate from those of its constituent libraries, but there's no reason there has to be just one.
Ah! I see your point. Boost as an organization will have a number of repositories, wikis, databases, mailing lists, etc. In an organizational sense they are all part of Boost, but it doesn't really make a lot of sense to describe any single one of them as "central". --Beman