Boost has now close to 100 libraries. In addition there are hundreds of smaller but necessary facilities which aren't technically libraries but they add a lot to the "surface area" that one's brain has to be familiar with to take best advantage of boost facilities. There is also a lot of interconnectedness which makes it an even larger task. This wasn't a big deal when boost was 15 libraries - but now it's different. I would like to propose a classification of boost libraries and guidelines for future libraries. a) Layering of libraries =============== 0) C++ standard library 1) "boost core" libaries 2) "boost utility" libraries 3) "boost user" libraries b) Guidelines ========= 1) a library in a given layer shall include code from libraries in a higher layer 2) boost core libraries are in namespace "boost" 3) boost user libraries are in the name space boost::<name of user library> 4) there is a special user library named "utility" for small libraries which are widely used. 5) boost header directory structures should match namespace structure. example, a library named boost.range should have all it's code in namespace boost::range and in the directory boost/range. 6) exception to 5) above, a user library might have a "convenience header" in directory "boost" which includes all the header directories of that user library. c) Rationale ======== 1) it diminishes the possibility of namespace conflicts as boost/C++ grows 2) it diminishes the possibility of importing a lot more code and depencies than one expected. 3) a library can control its depencies. Often a library will rely only on "boost core". This means that users of the library can know that code is dependent only on that library. 4) It more easily supports the concept of "boost modularization" where by deployment of a subset of boost libraries is can be supported. It's often mentioned how other languages like java, C#, perl have HUGE number of libraries in comparison to C++. I believe these languages have reached their peak and are in fact in decline somwhat. It is possible that this huge number of libraries make them less attractive rather than more? Perhaps a little more formal structure applied to our work might be agood thing. Robert Ramey