Is header dependency table useful?

From: Beman Dawes (beman_at_[hidden])
Date: 2000-10-31 11:01:58

At the Boost meeting in Toronto, Nico Josuttis asked that we publish header 
dependencies.  His motivation was wanting to know what other headers have 
to be available to use one of the Boost headers.  I thought it would also 
be useful as a way of judging the degree of coupling.

I've written a little program to which turns the GCC -M dependency output 
into an HTML table.  See 
http://www.egroups.com/files/boost/hpp-dependencies.html

I originally choose a table rather than a Doxygen style chart because it 
was more compact.  But also look at 
http://www.crystalclearsoftware.com/users/jeff/boost/regex.hpp.html (thanks 
to Jeff Garland).  Doxygen isn't picking up the indirect includes, and so 
gives a less useful view, IMO.  I don't know if it has an indirect include 
option.

Please take a look at my HTML table in the files/vault, and then comment:

*  Is the table useful and worth including on the boost web site?

*  Should implementation detail headers be included or excluded?

*  Should the 2nd column entries be sorted?

I'm not including Standard Library headers; exactly which ones get included 
is very Standard Library implementation dependent.

It might be nice to include Standard Library headers called directly from 
Boost headers, but I don't offhand see an easy way to do that.

--Beman