Re: [jamboost] Re: help building boost with V2

From: Vladimir Prus (ghost_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-09-29 00:39:00

David Abrahams wrote:

> > I don't know why nobody did any big changes. That may be because of
> > lack of time, or because people don't run into design issues. I
> > don't know, but it would be great to find out.
>
> I can only speak for myself, but from my standpoint it's mostly
> because the architecture of the system and its overall flow of control
> and data is either unfathomable or just too complex to change with any
> confidence. Having tests helps, but doesn't help very much if you
> think it's likely you'll just break them no matter what you do. I
> liken it to the structure of GNUs, which amazingly (to me) has several
> developers working on it.

I reply to this part in another message.

> My pet peeve, property-adjuster, is an example of something incurs a
> great deal of complexity in the architecture for a very general
> mechanism which is only used in one specific way and for a single test
> case which it's not very clear should be supported. If similar
> choices are made in enough places, it becomes very difficult to hold
> the design of the system in one's head. What little understanding of
> the architecture I am able to develop dissipates quickly. If you have
> to crawl through lots of code just to put together a picture of what's
> happening before you begin, it becomes a poor investment to try at
> all.

Yep, that serves as an illustration, but in this particular case, I have a 
good conterargument. Some time ago I wrote the following on the subject of 
property-adjuster 
(in http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.build/3589/)

Please feel free to remove this feature for now. It would be best if the 
change is made with a single commit that touches nothing else, so that
we can use the diff if/when this behaviour should be implemented again.

So, the ball is on your side.

- Volodya