Re: [boost] [modularization] Are modular releases a goal or a non-goal?

Subject: Re: [boost] [modularization] Are modular releases a goal or a non-goal?
From: Niall Douglas (s_sourceforge_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-09-17 19:32:17

On 17 Sep 2014 at 22:40, Stephen Kelly wrote:

> And I get all of it. There are no separate 'modular Boost' tarballs so that 
> I can download what I want and not what I don't.
> 
> Is something similar to this a goal or a non-goal for 'Boost 
> modularization'?

I have begun weekend work as I said I would on my clang AST parser 
based C++11-STL-to-Boost bindings generator. These enable one to map 
the C++ 11 STL into a namespace (either library-local or just 
namespace boost) as if it were Boost, thus eliminating the need for 
the rest of Boost.

I am aiming to split off AFIO, Expected and Thread as standalone 
STL-only libraries first in that order - this approach does require 
source code changes (mostly regex find and replace). I don't 
personally need any of the other Boost libraries, so it'll be up to 
others if they wish to reuse my tools to do the same for their 
libraries.

Once the tools are ready (hopefully early 2015) I'll mount a simple, 
automated website which provides an alternative distro for Boost 
libraries where you tick boxes to create whatever distro you want a 
bit like with jQuery. I'll also rank libraries according to the 
automatically calculated quality scoring metrics I outlined on this 
list some months ago. And the  C++ 11 only fork of Boost I proposed 
some months ago will be on its way.

Note that this proposed website shall make use of AJAX calls into the 
existing Boost infrastructure, so it's a thin rather than thick fork. 
My biggest bugbear with the status quo is the lack of automatic 
deprecation of insufficiently maintained libraries and lack of 
automatic entry of high quality new libraries. I have no wish to 
supplant anything else, including community review. And joining the 
fork does not require leaving the current Boost distro, in fact as 
the fork has no build system, it means you can't use it for 
non-header-only libraries, so we'll still be relying on the main 
distro for unit testing etc.

Niall

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