Re: [boost] The problems with Boost development

Subject: Re: [boost] The problems with Boost development
From: Andrey Semashev (andrey.semashev_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-03-21 04:48:43

On 03/21/2010 12:24 AM, Vladimir Prus wrote:
> Andrey Semashev wrote:
>
>> 3. Monolithic design.
>> =====================
>>
>> This matter has already been discussed, and others have made the
>> suggestions, so I'll just express my thoughts of improving things.
>
> Could you clarify what exactly is the problem with monolithic design?
> Is that merely that "Boost is too big" and it makes it harder to
> add it as dependency for a project?

As a user, I constantly find myself excluding parts of Boost from 
building. There are many header-only components I also don't use. 
Overall, my estimations is that I use no more than 50% of libraries. So 
I want to be able to exclude the unneeded part.

As a developer, I would like to be able to ship releases as often as 
needed, not necessarily bound to the current release schedule of Boost. 
I also think that the monolithic design limits the appearance of new 
libraries in Boost, as it implies the same quality standards on the well 
established libraries and the new coming ones.

Some performance problems of SVN and Trac have been identified by users. 
I think, they resulted from centralized storage of Boost artifacts 
(which are the source code and tickets).

Some have concerns about testing results turnaround. Since now the whole 
Boost should be tested as a whole, that problem will grow bigger over 
time. A modular approach would allow each tester to run tests only for 
one or several libraries and thus produce the results more often.