Re: [boost] RE process (prospective from a retired FreeBSD committer)...

Subject: Re: [boost] RE process (prospective from a retired FreeBSD committer)...
From: Edward Diener (eldiener_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-01-31 09:54:23

On 1/31/2011 12:38 AM, Dave Abrahams wrote:
> At Sun, 30 Jan 2011 22:06:07 -0500,
> Edward Diener wrote:
>>
>> On this basis my own concern, whether a DVCS is used or not, is the
>> dependencies between libraries.
> ...
>> This means some way of incorporating version information in
>> header files, some way of incorporating version information in shared
>> libraries, some way of checking both transparently, and all of this
>> must work in whatever environments a future individually distributed
>> Boost targets.
>
> Those are all "nice-to-haves" that are not practiced by the many other
> projects that include such dependency relationships.  Care to design
> that system?

If this is not practiced by many other projects, perhaps that is because 
there are few other projects potentially seeking to deliver their 
libraries separately. But of course I think you are not entirely correct 
as the various problems of DLL dependencies on Windows and the tools on 
Linux to resolve dependencies when upgrading some application on Linux show.

I would only seek to design such a system if there would be felt a need 
to do so by others also. In the face of "nobody else finds a need to do 
this so why should we" why would I expend my energy designing such a 
system or discussing it with others ?

I will only offer that if Boost does in the future decide to deliver 
individual libraries rather than a single monolothic distribution as it 
does now, that end-users finding that library X version N.N does not 
work with library Y version N.N, of which it has a dependency 
relationship, will not be happy campers. If Boost developers think that 
is fine in such a system and that it is up to the end-users to figure 
out what works with what each time some upgraded library comes out, that 
is fine with me although I disagree that such a state of affairs would 
be good for Boost.