Hi all,

at the moment, we have three packages for boost: boost itself, which
includes a lot of libraries and is very big, boost-thread which provides
the threading library, and boost-python which provides the python
interface.

I would like to refactor these packages in the following ways:

1) Make devel/boost be a meta package that pulls in all boost-*
   packages.  This should then be moved to meta-pkgs.  This directory
   could also include the shared makefiles.

2) Create a boost-tools package that includes bjam (basically to avoid
   rebuilding it over and over again).  This could be a build dependency
   for all other boost-* packages.

3) Create boost-<library> packages for each independent library.  We'd
   do this "on demand".  I.e., AFAICS, the only package in pkgsrc that
   uses boost is monotone, and it requires 4 libraries.  I'd start by
   creating these four packages, and adding more when requested.  Just
   like we do with gst-plugins*.

The thing is that I don't like the huge boost package we actually have.
It includes too many things and becomes a very big dependency for small
programs (not to mention the time required to build it).

I.e., I'm now considering to use boost in a personal project, but I only
need one or two of its libraries; pulling in all the other stuff is just
unnecessary.

Before I start to work on this, I'd like to know if there are any
suggestions or objections to this.

And, BTW, why does boost use dynamic PLISTs?  I haven't inspected this
yet, but I will try to change it to static ones if possible (of course,
using some PLIST_SUBSTs for the BOOST_TOOLSET part et all).

Thanks,

-- 
Julio M. Merino Vidal <jmmv84@gmail.com>
http://www.livejournal.com/users/jmmv/
The NetBSD Project - http://www.NetBSD.org/