Re: [Boost-users] Help needed with Boost header only libraries

Subject: Re: [Boost-users] Help needed with Boost header only libraries
From: Ovanes Markarian (om_boost_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-05-23 16:16:31

On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 9:09 PM, Lars Viklund <zao_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 07:02:45PM +0200, Ovanes Markarian wrote:
> > On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 1:52 PM, Lars Viklund <zao_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> >
> [...]
>
> You read me wrong. I said to copy the boost/ directory as a whole.
>
> Then of course, if you feel brave, you can always remove libraries that
> you know it will not depend on.
>
> Personally, I do not see the need to extract single libraries, as the
> cost (hours/days of work, which may blow up) way outweighs the benefits
> (what, saving a couple of megs of disk space?).
>

Lars,

It is not the matter of saving some megs. It can easily happen, that you
need to implement some tooling where boost would be extremely helpful. But
you are unable to reference some existing boost lib distro in the enterprise
repository, because it is not there. It is also not possible to put boost
libs within some short term into the common libs repository, since there
might be some evaluation processes when a lib is allowed to be a part of
common repository.

On the other hand the tool to be developed is so small (a couple of files)
that you still don't want to put into the tools repo the whole boost
headers. What do you think how many header files are in the boost header
directory? In the 1.45 there are over 7500 files. In that case it means,
that your user will need to check-out over 7500 files to build some tiny
tool. Do you really want the users of that tiny project to be required to
check out with your 20 source files about 7500 files, and that only because
you just wanted shared pointer or some other small lib form boost?

It might be hard to understand but there are some enterprise policies in big
companies and there is no way to just to overcome them.

Best Regards,
Ovanes