On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 2:48 PM, David Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com> wrote:

Beman wrote:

> I'm overwhelmed! This is unbelievably slick, better than a lot of
> software installs that have been around for years!

I totally agree that this is great work, but Beman, have you used the
installer provided by Boost Consulting?

Yes. My comment about other installers wasn't a reflection on the Boost Consulting installer, but rather on several commercial products I've installed recently that have really sad installers.
 
 It does some important and
useful things that the CMake-generated installers do not (yet).  Most
notable among them, all the binaries are downloaded on demand from
SourceForge mirrors, and the interface for selecting libraries and
toolsets is both intuitive and flexible.  Daniel Wallin did some killer
work to make that happen, and it should be incorporated in our CMake
process.

Good, but I hope this is all stuff that will be maintained by the CPack folks, not by Boost. The other issue I'm very concerned about is robustness and reliability. From the standpoint of release manager, it is really essential that (1) the installer doesn't require hand configuration before every release, (2) it can be tested automatically as part of the daily release snapshot process, and (3) it copes with problems like a SourceForge mirror being unresponsive. Using SourceForge mirrors doesn't seem compatible with daily snapshots, by the way.

--Beman