Re: [Monotone-devel] [ANNOUNCE] monotone 0.34 release

[Zack Weinberg]

On 4/1/07, Julio M. Merino Vidal <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 01/04/2007, at 15:02, Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker wrote:
> >         - Date and time display has now been reimplemented internally
> >           to avoid Boost more.  This means that we have lowered our
> >           dependency from Boost 1.33.0 to 1.32.0.
>
> I haven't been following for a while but... does this mean that
> Monotone wants to move away from Boost?

At the summit, we agreed that we want to move away from the components
of Boost that use link-time libraries - with the date and time
reimplementation, that's just ::filesystem and ::regex.¹  See
http://mrtock.ucsd.edu/~zack/talks/2007-mtn-sprint.pdf (pages 34-43)
for some discussion.  [We decided to move away from regexes entirely
rather than switch to PCRE.]   We might also try to reduce our use of
Boost's header-only libraries, but they are rather less troublesome,
and as you say, they could be bundled (it is impractical to bundle the
components that use libraries, mainly because Boost's build system is
so horrid, as Richard points out upthread).

date_time happened to be the easiest of the three libraries to get rid
of, which is why it was done in 0.34 and the other two weren't.  There
is some partial work on getting rid of b::regex on the
.experiment.deregexp branch.  Nobody is currently working on
b::filesystem that I know of.

zw

¹ And the unit test library, but as that isn't linked into the main
monotone executable, it is much less of a concern.  (Except we have to
stop using it if we want to get rid of the boost-external-library
Autoconf gunk.  Bother, said Pooh.)