Re: [boost] License of endian and limits in Boost detail

Subject: Re: [boost] License of endian and limits in Boost detail
From: Philip Bennefall (philip_at_[hidden])
Date: 2013-03-13 18:45:38

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Maddock" <boost.regex_at_[hidden]>
To: <boost_at_[hidden]>
Sent: Tuesday, March 12, 2013 10:31 AM
Subject: Re: [boost] License of endian and limits in Boost detail

> Are there any news on what might be done regarding this? I looked a little
> more into it today, and it appears as though something as trivial as
> boost/circular_buffer.hpp pulls in the whole config folder with endian.hpp
> and limits.hpp so I am avoiding using them altogether for now in this
> project.

I've just removed detail/limits.hpp and edited boost/limits.hpp to not refer
to it.

We'll see if anyone complains I guess.

endian.hpp is harder to know what to do with: there's no actual code in
there, it's more like the accumulated wisdom of multiple Boosters plus bug
reports etc.  I'm actually not sure why SGI's copyright ended up in there:
looks like when Caleb Epstein originally wrote that header he borrowed the
"wisdom" from limits.hpp and so put SGI's copyright on it.  Any ideas on how
we would go about creating a clean version?  If someone described the logic
in words, and someone else wrote a new header from the description would
that do it - or am I deceiving myself?

Thanks, John.

I don't know enough about the subject of detecting endianness to offer a 
sensible practical suggestion. Is there any official maintainer responsible 
for endian.hpp? It just seems such a pity to me that a part of Boost that 
almost every library seems to depend on, has these legal ambiguities. I 
tried bcp:ing everything from shared_ptr to circular_buffer to cstdint to 
property_tree, and all of them pull in this particular file (seemingly by 
depending on boost/config.hpp).

Kind regards,

Philip Bennefall