Re: [release] Boost 1.81.0 Release Candidate 1 is available

From: Seth (bugs_at_[hidden])
Date: 2022-12-13 18:52:31

On Tue, Dec 13, 2022, at 2:03 AM, Mojca Miklavec via Boost wrote:

> Supporting novice users (as well as setting up CI jobs) on tons of
> operating systems is a nightmare as dependencies grow.
Agreed

> And, in fact, I would dare to claim that CMake's FetchContent does in
> a way count to be "a package manager". Not a fully fledged one, but
> certainly an extremely useful one.
This claim seems to be undercut by the implication that you don't know package managers that provide boost. I assume that was merely for the sake of the argument, and you probably know them full well. I, for one, like to build boost manually, but I've used conan, biicode, build2, vcpkg and even nuget in the past. They all "worked".

FetchContent burdens developers with duplicating the logic - specifically platform-specific dependencies as you pointed out - to build dependencies. Of course, this implies high degree of control. However, that does not usually jibe with novice-friendliness or portability.

> Bottomline: having a CMake-compliant source version of Boost is still
> extremely, extremely useful.

Agreed. But not with the goal of being novice friendly or "package-management" (quite the opposite: it's to allow experts to streamline their build scripts and pick bespoke revisions)

Just my perspective,
Seth