Re: [boost] Library list generated from meta/libraries.json files

Subject: Re: [boost] Library list generated from meta/libraries.json files
From: Daniel James (dnljms_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-01-05 12:14:14

On 5 January 2015 at 14:10, Peter Dimov <lists_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> I've put a library list generated from the meta/libraries.json files, at:
>
>    http://www.pdimov.com/tmp/boost/index.html

We're already dealing with this on the website, this is how the
documentation list is generated. The full data is at:

http://www.boost.org/doc/libraries.xml

Which was set up by Rene years ago. It includes libraries with no
existing metadata file. Nowadays it's maintained by a mix of php
scripts and manual editing. The way it stores historical data is
awkward because I shoehorned it into existing code, so it'll probably
be easier to handle if I write a little web service to get a release's
details in json format.

> Library authors may wish to take a look at their library entry and see if
> they're happy with it. What I've noticed so far is that many libraries are
> missing the boost-version (First Release) entry, and that Config is missing
> authors for some reason.

Historical data is handled centrally, so it would be redundant and
error prone to store it in the library repos (e.g. if a library was
pulled from a release, but wasn't updated accordingly). But some of
the first metadata files still have it.

> The other thing is that the category names in the json files are the
> internal identifiers, which I've left as-is, as I didn't want to hardcode a
> mapping. We'll have to decide whether to use the proper names in the json
> files, or whether to have a separate categories.json with the mapping
> somewhere. I tend towards the first option.

As you've probably noticed by now, the categories are in the xml file.