[boost] Making the Windows binaries 'official'

Subject: [boost] Making the Windows binaries 'official'
From: Tom Kent (lists_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-08-14 21:03:18

<history>
After the boostpro.com organization dissolved, there was never an official
place to go to get pre-built binaries for the releases. Some random
components were made available on the sourceforge download page and I had
been hosting them on my own website (http://boost.teeks99.com) since I
started building them around the release of 1.37.
A couple years ago, before the release of 1.54, I asked the community if
they would like my builds to be hosted on the sourceforge site, and the
answer was positive:
http://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost/2013/04/202460.php

Since the 1.54 release, I've generally been uploading the windows binaries
based on the RCs and enabling the downloads just a few minutes after the
release notice goes out.
</history>

I would now like to propose that we make these libraries an official part
of each Boost release. I don't think this entails much, just the following:

1) Have the release team coordinate with me to ensure that the binaries are
ready before announcing the release.
2) Include a link to them in the release announcement.
3) Link to them from the website.

It would also be good to get others who can run the scripts to perform the
build, if I am someday unable to do this. The biggest hurdle here is having
a (virtual) machine with all six versions of visual studio on it.

Is this something the community would be in favor of? I know that many of
the people on these lists don't use windows and if they do are generally
capable of building the windows binaries themselves, however there is a
large group out there that prefers to just get the installer for them (like
they do for other projects like Qt, wxWidgets, etc).

Thoughts?

Tom Kent