[boost] Re: Customer Friendlier Boost Installation

From: David Abrahams (dave_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-05-25 18:26:15

"Victor A. Wagner Jr." <vawjr_at_[hidden]> writes:

> At 04:13 2005-05-25, Stuart Dootson wrote:
>>[deleted]
>>One final point - whoever came up with the autolinking scheme (think
>>it was John Maddock?) - thank you very much - that makes life *so*
>>much easier!
>
> Yes, it does!
> It's a wonder that the committee didn't insist long ago that there be a 
> directive in the language which would pass a name(file?) to the linker for 
> processing.  

Maybe because nobody ever wrote a proposal for it.  The committee
doesn't "insist" on things.  We review and approve proposals and
process issues (possible problems) with the current standard.
Sometimes a few interested people actually work on proposals that make
things better.  If you're interested in that functionality, write a
proposal.

> It's not like we haven't been fighting this problem since the 
> late 1970s and it's still a compiler specific thing.  Kinda makes you 
> wonder exactly what things the committee deems important, 

That's rather needlessly snide, isn't it?  All these people
volunteering their time to make _your_ C++ better, trying to work on
so many things that so many people who *don't* volunteer their time
think are really important, and all you can do is wonder out loud what
we think is important?  If you think it's important, make a proposal
and it will get addressed.

> and why (we STILL don't have #pragma once as a "standard"
> requirement).

Well, one reason I can think of -- aside from the obvious one that we
haven't had a proposal to consider -- is that #pragma is by definition
reserved for implementation-specific hooks.

-- 
Dave Abrahams
Boost Consulting
www.boost-consulting.com