[boost] Re: Customer Friendlier Boost Installation

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-05-25 20:57:08

"David Abrahams" <dave_at_[hidden]> wrote in message 
news:u64x651m0.fsf_at_boost-consulting.com...
> "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.

This proposal mechanism that Dave describes above is the only way to get 
anything new and important into the standard. (Once in a while something new 
but trivial comes in from an issues list, but that is limited to really 
simple stuff like a missing overload.)  No one is exempt from having to 
write a proposal to get anything non-trivial into the standard. In the back 
of the Library TR is a bibliography which lists the proposals which went 
into TR1. Look at them. That is how stuff got into TR1. None of it is there 
because the committee "insisted" on it. It is there because some volunteers 
(often Boosters) wrote proposals.

--Beman