Re: [boost] [modular-boost] Development procedures

Subject: Re: [boost] [modular-boost] Development procedures
From: Daniel James (dnljms_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-02-04 17:16:34

On 4 February 2014 01:08, Gennadiy Rozental <rogeeff_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> Daniel James <dnljms <at> gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Boost build searches for includes when compiling C++ files in order to
>> check if any have been updated, I believe it checks if the original
>> file has been updated when doing that in order to update the link.
>
> Hmmm.. I do not think I like this approach. What if I am not using
> Boost.Build (I have VS projects for Boost.Test for example)? What if I just
> want to see/grep the content of the file.
>
> Any chance we can reconsider? This look like a very bad setup to me.
> In my opinion this should be separate manual step or something which is done
> when one is updating boost tree.

You can do it manually, just run 'b2 headers'. Hopefully, you can
configure Visual Studio to do that before builds.

> Interestingly, if we switch to links to directories, we do not need to do
> anything in majority of the cases. Only when new library is added or old is
> removed we need to chansge boost/ content.

Others have responded about windows, which I know nothing about. On
linux directories are now soft links if they contain headers from only
one module, but if they contain headers from multiple modules then
they can't be a soft link.

>> >> 'git submodule update' takes a long time as a fresh tree because it
>> >> has to clone over a 100 modules.
>> >
>> > I was running on freshly cloned tree. What else does it needs to clone?
>>
>> All the libraries and tools. If you have a clone of every module and
>> it's still slow, then I have no idea. You haven't really explained
>> what you've done and it's not that slow for me.
>
> I followed the procedures on a wiki. I cloned *full* boost.org tree and run
> "git submodule update" command on it.

I guess it's just slow on windows then. Btw. when referring to a wiki
page, please link to it.

>> > What if I have local changes, but want to update to HEAD on master
>> > branch of other libs? I think this is very common need and we should
>> > document steps one needs to take for this.
>>
>> You could create a wiki page.
> ...
>> > Can we setup some kind of scripts to help developers with routine tasks
>> > like this?
>>
>> Yes you can.
>
> Daniel,
>
> I was not suggesting that you should be doing this. I was merely suggesting
> that we *need* to do this.
>
> Do we have anyone working on modular boost migration actively? Unfortunately
> I am not in a position to volontier at the moment, but I think this is
> important area and we need someone to be responcible for it.

Beman sent an email asking for volunteers a little while ago, but no
one responded. The build people are doing the build things, and the
test people are doing the test things, but no one is really doing the
more general things at the moment.