On Fri, 18 Feb 2005 08:43 pm, Julio M. Merino Vidal wrote:
> 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,

I'm not very founded to split up boost more than it already is. The standard 
package contains 28 library files of 150k average size totalling appr. 4.5Mb.
I can't see how fragmenting this package even further will be of any benefit.

I've just completed several packages for GnuRadio and contemplated to submit 
these as soon as wxGTK and py-wxWindows get updated to their corresponding 
current versions. The GnuRadio packages require booth of boost and 
boost-threaded.

cheerio Berndt
-- 
Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is doing a public service.
[Leslie Stephen]