Re: [boost] Missing Documentation on Building and Installing Documentation.

Subject: Re: [boost] Missing Documentation on Building and Installing Documentation.
From: Stirling Westrup (swestrup_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-03-22 15:31:00

On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 7:25 PM, Julian Gonggrijp <j.gonggrijp_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> Stirling Westrup wrote:
>
>> Julian Gonggrijp wrote:
>>
> I think you should consider the Boost tree to be your installation of
> Boost. The additional copies of the headers and the libraries are just
> for convenience. If you throw away the Boost tree, you throw away your
> Boost installation together with the documentation that starts at
> $BOOST_ROOT/index.html.

If I were to simply untar Boost into my include directory I would end
up with documentation files in my include directory, where they don't
belong, and where my system will not look for them, and were I to
build the libraries, they would end up putting large amounts of
extraneous files into the my include directory.

So, I generally approve of the fact that bjam is capable of building
the libraries and installing them and the headers into the canonical
locations for my system. The only problem is that bjam does not know
about the documentation. All I want is someone to tell it how to
relocate the docs. If this breaks any documentation, then arguably
this is just as much of a bug as having headers that break when
relocated, and can be addressed on a case-by-case basis.

>
> Note that Boost is not only targeted at Linux users. Moreover, the
> getting started guide is very clear about the structure of the Boost
> tree, including the location of the documentation.

It may be clear about the structure of the Boost tree, but the fact
that Installation guide provides an installation method makes the
structure of the Boost tree appear irrelevant to everyone except the
developers of Boost.

-- 
Stirling Westrup
Programmer, Entrepreneur.
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