Re: [boost] CMake Announcement from Boost Steering Committee

Subject: Re: [boost] CMake Announcement from Boost Steering Committee
From: Gary Furnish (gfurnish_at_[hidden])
Date: 2017-07-27 15:28:26

On Thu, Jul 27, 2017 at 8:40 AM, Rene Rivera via Boost
<boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> Since you are making a variety of accusations..
>
> On Wed, Jul 26, 2017 at 11:01 PM, Gary Furnish via Boost <
> boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
>> I've observed from the outside that basically no one was ever
>> going to touch boost.build because the people who like it (who happen
>> to be single points of failure for the entire boost ecosystem)
>> basically out-shouted everyone whenever a technical discussion came
>> up.
>
>
> Prove it.
Sure.  See the discussions where if you aren't doing things the
boost-build way and are instead a config-per-directory way your
basically considered a second class citizen in spite of that being the
way the rest of the oss world works.  The fact that it is still
non-obvious how to do this without touching anything besides a build
directory is awful.  This should be somewhere in big bold letters.
>
>
>>   Its not like there haven't been concerns about boost.build for
>> years.
>
>
> All build systems, heck all software, has "concerns".
Yes but the issues that I'm talking about are things that have been an
issue for years and never got fixed. See also silently dropping flags
if you use a space and don't quote in bjam files (something also not
obvious and yet important to pass compiler flags!). At least
CMAKE/most sane build systems will put up errors somewhere along the
lines.
>
>
>> Its not like the documentation for boost.build wasn't
>> basically "ask the mailing list or prey someone else has asked stack
>> overflow" for years.
>
>
> The documentation is bad compared to what other documentation?

The documentation is bad compared to say, CMAKE, which isn't great in
the first place.  Setting up an out of build directory has always been
a pain with poorly documented flags needing to be invoked to share a
common source directory (and its worth noting that I'm not sure its
technically parallel safe in any reasonable way given the need to
bootstrap and create header links and what not).
>
>
>> Its not like every time a new version of MSVC
>> beta comes out boost.build doesn't break and its not a priority
>> because the maintainers of boost.build don't use MSVC.
>
>
> Prove that it wasn't a priority. Considering that the last Boost release
> was delayed precisely to support MSVC building.
It was delayed to support the final release.  CMAKE supported it from
the first beta.  Given that MSVC is specifically making an effort to
implement features to be part of the standards process, this is
basically a choice between using boost or being on MSVC's and C++
cutting edge.  Support for MSVC has basically always been this bad as
far as I remember.  It should have never been necessary to delay a
release to support a key platform when there were four betas.
>
>
>> Its not like
>> everyone submitting to boost doesn't complain about having to learn a
>> non-standard build system that isn't documented richly enough to write
>> scripts from scratch.
>
>
> Again, prove it.
I've seen a number of emails here where people basically said "and
then I had to learn this extra crazy language to get stuff into
boost."  I'm not sure why this is a contentious point.  By definition
you have to learn an entire new build system to get something into
boost.  Is there a simple "and this is what you need to do to build a
new module in boost webpage?" No there isn't.  There never has been.
>
>
>> These are not new problems.  I am *really* glad
>> that SC did something because in my mind it means boost won't die a
>> slow death to just posting independent libs on github.
>>
>
> Prove that the build system is the reason Boost is "dying a slow death"?
> For that matter prove that Boost is dying in the first place.
>
How many of the latest proposals for C++ have actually been in boost?
Ranges?  Polymorphic allocators?  I can not remember the last time I
watched a CPPCON/etc video and someone was talking about bringing
something from boost into the standard library besides filesystem
(which is legacy) or asio (which technically is standalone).

> Note.. Yes I will keep posting in these threads in response to false
> accusations to the decades of work some of us have put into Boost.
>
Standing here and shouting at users for for making "false accusations"
when they have real, specific issues with boost is not a way to make
boost look friendly or the place to contribute to.
> --
> -- Rene Rivera
> -- Grafik - Don't Assume Anything
> -- Robot Dreams - http://robot-dreams.net
> -- rrivera/acm.org (msn) - grafikrobot/aim,yahoo,skype,efnet,gmail
>
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