[boost] Keeping Boost in sync and extending it.

From: Michael Marcin (mmarcin_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-09-26 20:43:10

Hello,

I work with Boost on a daily basis and generally I work with svn trunk. 
I also use some boostified libraries that are not officially accepted 
into Boost yet. There are also times when I need to make changes to the 
way a component or library behaves that are not well factored enough to 
make it in to the official tree but serve their purpose.

How do I manage these complications?

At present I have a folder named boost which has an external named clean 
to svn trunk and a folder named patch which mirror's trunk's layout but 
contains some unofficial boost components from the vault or the sandbox 
as well as some local modifications but not a full copy of trunk.

The first problem comes up while extending BBv2 to handle a new 
compiler. I must point boost-build.jam to a directory and it will look 
there for all its files so if I have changes I have to copy the entire 
boost/tools/build folder into the patch directory tree. Now I'm free to 
modify it and add files but it will quickly go stale and need to be 
resynced with trunk.

I thought of creating svn patch files, checking those into my local 
repository and then just applying those patches when I checkout but 
those cannot handle the addition of files. It also makes it impossible 
to simply checkout from svn and have things just work which I very much 
want.

I have a similar problem with the open source Adobe libraries which 
relates back to Boost. I need to patch those libraries to point to my 
version of Boost not theirs so I don't have 2 versions of Boost floating 
around in my code.

In the past I've just copied the whole repository done my changes 
locally and hand merged with the latest from the Boost repository when I 
needed to update. This is tedious and error prone.

Does anyone else have this problem?
If so, how did you solve it?

Thanks,

Michael Marcin