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 14:46:44

On 03/21/2010 03:58 PM, Vladimir Prus wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
> Are you concerned about disk space of sources, disk space of build
> products (can be easily skipped already), download size, or something
> else?

Disk space and the number of files. We use nightly builds of our 
products, and this includes a complete checkout of our repository, which 
includes Boost. Checking out a lot of needless files takes time and space.

>> 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.
>
> Well, it's possible to ship individual releases already, no biggie -- users
> would just have to rm boost/component and libs/component and unzip new
> release on top of that.

But that's kind of detached from Boost, IIUC. There is no common place 
for there point releases, there is no way to determine compatibility 
between releases of different libraries. I'm not aware of any library in 
Boost that does that.

>> 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).
>
> I believe they stem from current server hosting both. For example, KDE is
> a couple of orders of magnitute larger than Boost, and I never noticed
> significant performance problems with SVN.

Perhaps.