RE: [boost] An important question

From: Philip Nash (philip.nash_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-09-06 15:14:01

> I have similar concerns, but also worried that just lumping all of them
> into "General use" would quickly render that category too large.
>
> Is there a better way to separate the General and Helper entries into
> categories?

Possibly a hierarchical structure (so main categories could be sub divided
into sub-categories - which may also appear under other categories).
Alternatively, and as you go on to suggest yourself, placing the same
library in more than one category. Personally I am not so keen on this idea
as it waters down the goal of conciseness (and makes the set of libraries as
a whole appear even larger than it actually is, which is likely to deter new
users even more).

However, having said all that, and having spent a little more time examining
your currently proposed list, something occurs to me. I think everyone that
has looked at it so far is reasonably ok with the "correctness",
"workarounds", "maths", "string" and "other domains" categories, because
they drop out quite neatly.
The contentious categories are the "general use" and "helpers" categories.
Why is that? Maybe the categories are a little two vague and/or ambiguous?
(well lets face it they are, that's why they are in dispute!). Rather than
trying to fix the "implementation", lets take a leaf out of our own books
and step back and address the "design" :-)
Not that I think my following proposal is necessarily the right one, but it
might give you an idea:

It seems that many of the libraries in these two categories relate directly
to types, mostly as "containers":

any, array, conversion, smart_ptr, call_traits, type_traits, tuple,
compressed_pair

Perhaps this category could be simply called something like "Type
related"...?

If we take those out, what are left?

crc, pool, timer, utility, compose, function, functional, iterator adaptors,
operators and property_map

(Perhaps one or two of these belong in the type-related category?)
This group seems to consist of utilities and adaptors. We could split them
up into those two categories, or leave them all lumped together for now
(until this list grows again).

Just my 2 pence/ cents/ kroner worth :-)

[)o
IhIL..