On Apr 2, 2007, at 12:22 PM, Stefan Seefeld wrote:
Doug Gregor wrote:
Yes, it probably would be advantageous to have a single-entry-point layout, but we haven't found a good way to do it. svn:externals was one potential approach, but they aren't quite powerful enough to do what we need.
svn:externals would be useful to make sandbox projects appear as full boost versions (plus the new bits) to the user.
Except that you can only use svn:externals for *directories*, not for individual files. So, for example, while I could use svn:externals to bring in directories like "boost/mpi" and "libs/mpi", I could not use them to bring in "boost/mpi/mpi.hpp". I've looked into svn:externals; either I missed something big, or they just aren't sufficient to do what we want.
Why not simply treat the two (main boost, and sandbox) as separate ? All it should take to build something against the two is an additional set of paths (-I and -L), which should be easily hackable into the build system.
We are treating them as separate, but mirroring the layout.
The same strategy would be useful to build individual boost libraries in stand-alone mode, i.e. against all dependencies pre-installed. (See the discussion on boost modularity.)
Only if it's a strategy that works. svn:externals don't do that. Do we have something else? Cheers, Doug