Re: [boost] [GSoC] [Boost.Hana] Formal review request

Subject: Re: [boost] [GSoC] [Boost.Hana] Formal review request
From: Edward Diener (eldiener_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-07-28 23:03:27

On 7/28/2014 8:26 PM, Louis Dionne wrote:
> Louis Dionne <ldionne.2 <at> gmail.com> writes:
>
>>
>> Edward Diener <eldiener <at> tropicsoft.com> writes:
>>
>>>
>>> [...]
>>>
>>> A separate branch with the latest full documentation , maybe called
>>> 'doc' might be clearer.
>>
>> There is such a branch, and it's called `gh-pages`. It's the way of doing
>> things for projects on GitHub. The problem with providing the documentation
>> _only_ through a branch is that you have to check it out (and hence overwrite
>> the current working directory) to see it. So what I did is create such a
>> branch and then make it available through a submodule, so you can check out
>> that branch in a subdirectory.
>
> Okay, so I made some changes and here's how it works now:
>
>    1. If you clone the repository as instructed in the README, everything
>       just works.
>
>    2. If you clone the repository and then just checkout the submodule, but
>       not at its latest version, you get an empty directory with a README
>       telling you exactly the commands to get the latest documentation.
>
>    3. When I release stable versions of the library, the default checkout
>       of the documentation submodule will be the documentation for that
>       version of the library instead of an empty directory with a README,
>       as one would expect.

This is reasonable.

But I do not understand from your documentation how your library relates 
to Boost MPL. The Boost MPL library is about manipulating and creating 
types at compile time, and creating logic paths again at compile time to 
manipulate types. All of this is encapulated by the MPL's notion of 
metafunctions to do compile-time programming. But I cannot get from your 
documentation any of the MPL equivalence of how any of this is done with 
your library. Is your library meant to duplicate/replace this MPL 
functionality in some way ? Or is it meant to do something else entirely 
not related to compile-time programming ?

I am only asking this because I had been told that your library is at 
the the least a replacement for MPL compile-time type manipulation 
functionality using C++11 on up.