Re: [boost] [O/T git and workflows] A couple of questions

Subject: Re: [boost] [O/T git and workflows] A couple of questions
From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2012-03-16 09:50:52

On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 10:44 PM, Dave Abrahams <dave_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
> on Thu Mar 15 2012, Beman Dawes <bdawes-AT-acm.org> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 5:54 PM, Dave Abrahams <dave_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>>
>>> In my world there's no one central boost repo.  There's an "official"
>>> repo for each individual project in Boost.
>>
>> I have a worldview that goes like this:
>>
>>      There's an "official" repo for each individual project in Boost.
>>
>>      There is also a central boost repo, but it contains only the relatively
>>      few infrastructure files that apply to Boost as a whole, plus "references"
>>      to the official repos for the individual projects. The exact form of the
>>      "references" is immaterial to this world view, although certainly critical
>>      to the mechanics of how the central repo is used.
>>
>> Is that just a slightly more detailed version of your worldview, or do
>> you literally mean "no one central boost repo"?
>
> I literally mean that, at least in the way I've been thinking of
> "one central boost repo."
>
>> If you literally mean that, I'm lost. How would any person or process
>> know what's a part of Boost?
>
> Certainly, we'll have to maintain a list of "references" delineating
> what's a part of Boost (e.g. like
> https://github.com/boost-lib/boost/tree/master/libs or
> http://gfxmonk.net/dist/0install/index/), and that list should be under
> source control somewhere, so you could think of that as central.

Yes, that's what I think of as the central repo. I.E. the root of the
tree. Even if the only thing in it is a simple text file listing the
URL's of the next level down repos, it still needs to be in a repo. At
some point we might have several possibly overlapping trees, but there
isn't any current plan to do so.

> However, there's not necessarily any reason that list must be in the
> same repo as any of those few infrastructure files that apply to Boost
> as a whole, or that those files should necessarily be grouped together
> (i.e. we should feel free to determine the most appropriate repository
> boundaries), or that any user of Boost will need a working copy of the
> repository that maintains the list of references.

Important points. Understood.

> You might well also think of the top-level Boost website material as
> "central," but that maybe ought not to go in the same repo as the list
> of references (or maybe not in any VCS repo–a database-backed CMS like
> Wordpress might be better).  The point is, Boost itself may have several
> "central" repositories separate from those of its constituent libraries,
> but there's no reason there has to be just one.

Ah! I see your point. Boost as an organization will have a number of
repositories, wikis, databases, mailing lists, etc. In an
organizational sense they are all part of Boost, but it doesn't really
make a lot of sense to describe any single one of them as "central".

--Beman