Re: [boost] asio status (was: 1.34 Release Plan)

From: Douglas Gregor (doug.gregor_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-01-26 10:18:39

On Jan 26, 2006, at 5:58 AM, Paul Baxter wrote:
> While on the subject of releases, it has been mooted that perhaps  
> Boost
> shouldn't be released as one monolithic package and that the  
> problem might
> be better tackled by a finer grained approach and having a two-tier  
> release
> management structure. Individual 'modules' are released upwards (and
> available as versioned outputs) and a main boost release is simply a
> collection of latest inter-operable set of versioned modules.

The problem with a fine-grained approach is that all of the grains  
have to fit together. We have to manage version dependencies between  
the components (e.g., to deal with breaks in backward compatibility),  
and deal with user problems that arise from mismatched component  
versions. We'd have to push our overly-taxed regression testing  
systems harder to cover various collections of modules.

I'm not completely against the finer-grained approach, but I've seen  
enough problems with it in other projects to cause some concern. Have  
you ever maintained a Linux system using Gentoo? It's nearly  
impossible to duplicate (and, thus, diagnose) errors from one system  
to the next, because nobody has exactly the same set of components.  
Often, compiling a new component will break because of some minor  
incompatibility with another component, forcing you to roll back  
something. Cygwin has the same issue, although the problems there  
usually result in weird instabilities due to misunderstood  
interactions between different versions of the components.

Where has the fine-grained approach worked well? How can Boost  
duplicate their model to successfully deploy a more modular Boost?  
How much effort would be involved both in the conversion and in  
maintaining the resulting modular Boost? I could spew more questions,  
but my underlying question is much more broad: While component- 
oriented systems work wonderfully on paper, I've seen far more  
failures than successes, and I'd like to see why we think Boost can  
get itself into the latter category.

        Doug