Re: Reducing dependency on Boost.Regex

From: Boris Kolpackov (boris_at_[hidden])
Date: 2023-03-13 12:54:13

John Maddock via Boost <boost_at_[hidden]> writes:

> Can I just point out that regex is now header only, and thus the dependency
> is only there if it's actually used, likewise ICU is not required to be
> present at build time, but only if boost/regex/icu.hpp is actually used.

This implicit "if you don't include the header then you don't need to
link the dependency" approach doesn't scale well to cases where Boost is
split into individual packages which are managed by a package manager.
When the package manager undertakes to provide a Boost library, it
should come with all the dependencies that could be needed for any
usage scenario, unless certain features are explicitly not enabled
(which is essentially what we have done -- not enabled regex by
default in a bunch of libraries; I suppose we could have instead not
enabled ICU in regex by default).