Re: [boost] [modularization] Are modular releases a goal or a non-goal?

Subject: Re: [boost] [modularization] Are modular releases a goal or a non-goal?
From: Daniel James (dnljms_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-09-23 16:27:47

On 23 September 2014 21:20, Emil Dotchevski <emildotchevski_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 2:51 AM, Daniel James <dnljms_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
>> I was against splitting up the repo in the first place, so I'm not
>> really the person to ask. But IMO the main (perhaps only) benefit is
>> that it makes version control easier. Merging under subversion was a
>> pain because we didn't have a coherent merge history and a monolothic
>> git repo would certainly have had the same problem. By splitting the
>> code into modules we can track what has been merged, and do things
>> like using the develop branch of a single library with the release
>> branch of other libraries.
>>
>> I don't really see any direct benefit to users. Maybe if we had some
>> sort of package management system it could, but we don't. I suspect
>> that packages shouldn't have a one-to-one relationship with git
>> modules. The reorganisation of the MPL module might be a model for how
>> multiple packages could be stored in a single repo.
>>
>
> Physical coupling is difficult to break, easy to introduce. That is to say
> users can not possibly suffer from the many repos because it is trivial to
> make a release that bundles everything together.
>
> As for the benefits of breaking up dependencies and splitting libraries
> into separate modules, they aren't limited to version control. Reducing
> coupling increases the efficiency of development and maintenance work in
> general, but that is only visible in very large projects. Which is why it
> gets neglected.

I was writing about splitting up repos. That's a completely separate
issue to reducing dependencies.