Re: [Boost-users] Header file granularity policy?

From: Scott Meyers (usenet_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-08-19 12:57:42

Jeff Garland wrote:
> I think you missed  the boost/filesystem.hpp -- I believe it includes 
> "everything" except the fstream.hpp.

There doesn't seem to be a boost/filesystem.hpp or 
boost/filesystem/filesystem.hpp in my 1.33.1 distribution. In fact, not anywhere 
in the distribution. Are you sure it's really there for you?

> I think it would be good to improve on this. Care to take a crack at writing 
> some guidelines for the docs?

I think library authors should at least be strongly encouraged to create a 
comprehensive header that typically does little more than include all the 
headers offered by the library.  This may have to be adapted to make sense for 
some libraries, but the idea should be that if I want to start playing around 
with the Fridget library, I should be able to include fridget.hpp and get 
everything I might want to use.  This enables an exploratory style of 
familiarizing oneself with a new library and imposes no cost on people who 
prefer to use the more granular headers.

Scott