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Subject: Re: [boost] Library metadata
From: Daniel James (dnljms_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-02-24 18:16:36


On 24 February 2014 15:14, Paul A. Bristow <pbristow_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> Will this be at a low enough level to be useful for a rambling library like Boost.Math?

This is what Boost.Math is using already, it's entry is a lot longer.
As Steven pointed out, I did show a lot of what can be represented.

> When one could look at the http://www.boost.org/development/tests/trunk/developer/math.html results,
> they showed a lot of yellow, but only for some compilers and platforms for *some tests*.
>
> There are:
>
> * very few compilers where the advice is "No way :-(" - don't bother.
>
> * lots where many uses will work (but not quite all uses, despite heroic efforts to cater for their
> foibles).
>
> * a few up-to-date ones with a "Everything works" advice.
>
> If all but the latter are marked as unusable, this will give an unnecessarily pessimistic view on
> the library.
>
> Boost.Multiprecision poses similar problems, and I am sure there are others too.

Sure, that's why it's tricky to add to the library metadata, I don't
want that file to be too complicated.

> PS I didn't find the regression page immediately using my favourite search engine.

You won't because the site's robots.txt tells bots not access any
pages under 'development'. This was done because the test results are
expensive to serve, and web crawlers were accessing every single test
result. I could probably relax it a bit so that the plain html pages
aren't blocked.

> I'm not quite
> sure what it should be called, but regression isn't the first name I would think of? It would be
> nice if users got to this metadata easily - without searching for 'regression' & 'metadata' ;-)

The idea is that the contents of the metadata files would be used to
generate information that's presented to users. Currently this is just
the library list on the website, but there should be other uses for
this.


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