Re: [boost] Status of various Boost initiatives?

Subject: Re: [boost] Status of various Boost initiatives?
From: Daniel James (daniel_at_[hidden])
Date: 2013-07-20 12:50:27

On Sat, 20 Jul 2013, at 06:02 PM, Dave Abrahams wrote:
> 
> on Thu Jul 18 2013, "Paul A. Bristow" <pbristow-AT-hetp.u-net.com> wrote:
> 
> > My original enquiry was to know if you have yet sketched out how the
> > docs for each library would be built and made available, and if they
> > would be available in some sort of combined way for reviewed and
> > accepted libraries, a bit like the Boostbook collection
> > http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_54_0/doc/html/index.html, but for
> > *all* libraries, preferably in some standardish format.
> >
> > I also see a need to be able to provide links to other Boost libraries
> > - Boost is highly, and increasingly, incestuous ;-)
> >
> > But if you haven't started consideration of this yet, then getting the
> > main files into GIT format is obviously has total priority.
> 
> Actually my plan is to ask other people (like you) to consider those
> questions and solve those problems.

As far as I'm concerned the plan is to adjust the header links to the
new location (probably using a one-off perl script) to get things
working quickly. And then try to do something better later.

Linking in boostbook is problematic, because xslt has no real support
for paths, so I expect the better solution might be to write some kind
of post-processor (for html and fop markup) which will adjust custom
urls depending on the situation. The urls would be similar to the
current 'boost:' urls, but with a way to specify the module, and they'd
work for images. Something like 'boost://math/doc/html/quaternions.html'
(btw. it would be better if math had forwarding file at places like
'libs/math/quaternion/index.html'). We'd also perhaps distribute a
version of the html documentation from before the mapping, so that
distributions can adjust the links as they see best. Should probably use
a better schema than 'boost', hopefully there's an official convention
for custom url schemas.

And then, in a future version of quickbook, we could rewrite relative
urls to this custom url schema so that they'd behave sanely.