On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 12:57 AM, Doug Gregor <doug.gregor@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 8:26 AM, Beman Dawes <bdawes@acm.org> wrote:
>>  - If we put information about each library into CMake, e.g., the
>> description, authors, maintainers, etc., that can be displayed when
>> the user's mouse hovers over that library's component in the
>> installer, e.g.,
>>       The Boost.Filesystem Library
>>
>>       Portable facilities to query and manipulate paths, files, and
>> directories.
>>
>>       Author: Beman Dawes <e-mail address>
>
> That would be a nice touch if it isn't too difficult.

I have this roughly implemented now, although I'd like to mess with it
a little more to make the results look nicer. The
boost_library_project macro, which is used to describe each library to
the CMake build system, now has arguments for a library description,
list of authors, and list of maintainers. It's documented here:

 http://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/wiki/CMakeLibraryProject

I've only annotated the Filesystem library so far (see
libs/filesystem/CMakeLists.txt), just to make sure everything works.
There's some grunt work here that someone needs to do, updating all of
the CMakeLists.txt files with information about each library. If
there's more information that we want to put into
boost_library_project (e.g., first release that contained the library,
standardization prospects, whatever), we can easily do that. Any
volunteers to go through the list of libraries to encode this
information? It's not hard, but it's important.

You might want to post a mention of this, and describe the boost-cmake list in general, on the developers and users lists if you think it is time to raise viability.

I've also forwarded this to Jared McIntyre, who has volunteered to help with release issues, to see if he is interested.

--Beman