Re: [boost] Idea: Boost Software Foundation?

Subject: Re: [boost] Idea: Boost Software Foundation?
From: Matt Chambers (matthew.chambers_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-11-25 10:54:24

Dean Michael Berris wrote:
> 1. As a project, Boost and Apache try to (and I'd like to say both do)
> deliver high quality open source components under a liberal and
> commercially friendly license. Boost has many sub-projects that are
> worth naming like Boost.Build, (Boost.?)Quickbook, BCP, and Boost.Jam
> (although a little stagnant IIRC). Maybe treating other libraries as
> sub-projects that have a publicly-accessible and easily "forkable"
> repository would be a good thing. Git and Github come to mind.
>
> 2. As a software distribution, Apache has decentralized the release
> management of the libraries and software projects under its umbrella.
> This means sub-projects can depend on specific version releases of
> other sub-projects instead of making sure that there's only one
> release that bundles everything together.
>   
If you want to compare with Apache, the Boost libraries are akin to the 
Apache Portable Runtime, not the Apache project as a whole (which is far 
more application-oriented than library-oriented). So it's not clear to 
me why you would want to split up libraries like Apache splits up 
applications. Sure, the Boost scope is bigger than APR, but not terribly 
so. I think if the libraries were split up as separate releases, that 
would shift the burden of synchronizing them to the library users, which 
seems like a very bad idea to me. It would make it easier in some cases 
to adopt a single library from Boost while leaving the others, but then 
trying to add more libraries begins the synchronization issue (e.g. some 
user has been using a recent version of library A; they want to start 
using library B, but library B's current release depends on an older 
version of library A, while the user depends on the recent version of A).

-Matt