Re: [boost] [O/T git and workflows] A couple of questions

Subject: Re: [boost] [O/T git and workflows] A couple of questions
From: Dave Abrahams (dave_at_[hidden])
Date: 2012-03-15 22:44:00

on Thu Mar 15 2012, Beman Dawes <bdawes-AT-acm.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 5:54 PM, Dave Abrahams <dave_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
>> In my world there's no one central boost repo. Â 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.
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.

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.

-- 
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com