On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 2:25 PM, Nicholas Devenish via Boost-users <boost-users@lists.boost.org> wrote:

I just ran into this myself. Is there a specific reason that only the
all-versions boost binary is distributed as an .7z and not the
individual packages?

If it's for beginners ease-of-use, then I'd expect it the other way
around - because somebody would know the internal version number of
visual studio but not how to decompress a 7z?

Nick

The reason for the installers is mostly historical...it seemed easier for users to run an installer than to unzip stuff. Not sure if this still holds true, I'd be curious what the user community thinks about this.

The all-versions .7z was added later, because of its size it was somewhat impractical to get into an installer, so it was distributed as a compressed archive.

Tom