Re: [boost] CMake, modular Boost, and other stories

Subject: Re: [boost] CMake, modular Boost, and other stories
From: James E. King III (jking_at_[hidden])
Date: 2019-04-23 20:00:00

On Tue, Apr 23, 2019 at 3:38 PM Rene Rivera via Boost
<boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
>
> I disagree. In my ideal world the "Boost" package wouldn't exist at all and
> you would only install/use/find the individual Boost libraries. Anything
> else is either living in the past or a convenient transitional method.
>

One look at https://pdimov.github.io/boostdep-report/develop/module-overview.html
is convincing enough to me that there are far too many dependencies to
consider boost anything except a single packaged, versioned entity
with many components.  Until C++ has package management that's as easy
to use and the dependencies are better managed with a tool and
distribution system as powerful as, say, python's pip - I don't see
that changing.

Given cmake already provides a find_package(Boost COMPONENTS ...), do
we need anything other than ensuring the dependencies in the
FindBoost.cmake are correct?  We could provide the list of
dependencies (perhaps we do?) to cmake so they are correct, or perhaps
cmake could make it so those dependencies could be loaded from a data
file that the boost build provides?

- Jim