On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 5:04 PM, Dave Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com> wrote:
At Sun, 27 Mar 2011 11:34:43 -0400, Edward Diener wrote:
When software is very good, but very complicated, it is often hard to get developers to realize that it is to their interest to explain the software as methodically and as thoroughly as they should.
Yes, but there is an alternative: simpler software (where one element of simplicity is similarity to, and a foundation of, tools and paradigms with which many people are already familiar).
They often resent it because they have produced this wonderful software system which they understand, and worked very hard on, and they can not understand why others should not understand it as well as they do with the explanation they produce to suit their own needs. I honestly believe this is the mindset into which the developers of Boost Build have settled. The system itself is wonderful, and does a tremendous number of things automatically for the developer, but when the developer needs to do something outside the normal way the Boost Build system operates, it is next to impossible finding this information in the documentation, because so much is missing or just assumes that the programmer should somehow know.
Part of that is because the design tries to do too much.
I actually don't think that the design is overly complicated. Creating a build script that works on many different platforms is not a simple problem (if you don't need a portable build script, there are many simpler solutions, for example it only takes a couple of minutes to throw the Boost Thread cpp files in a Visual Studio project if you need to use boost.thread on Windows.) My only problem with Boost Build is that it is oh so slow. Emil Dotchevski Reverge Studios, Inc. http://www.revergestudios.com/reblog/index.php?n=ReCode