[Monotone-devel] Re: ding dong, boost::filesystem is dead

[Anthony Williams]

"Zack Weinberg" <address@hidden> writes:

> On 7/12/07, Anthony Williams <address@hidden> wrote:
>> "Zack Weinberg" <address@hidden> writes:
>> Is that the problem --- the external libraries? If so, then people at boost
>> would like to know. There's always discussion about whether libraries should
>> be header-only or not.
>
> External libraries are definitely a problem for us.  Due to boost's
> bizarro build system, it is not practical to bundle them in the
> monotone build, and "I can't get boost built" is among the top five
> problems people have trying to build monotone from source.  If we use
> system-provided libraries, we have to match compilers and compile
> settings with them (see Debian bugs #404616 and #384565, for
> instance).   We can't even bundle the header-only libraries we use,
> because version skew between them and the external boost libraries
> would be lethal.

Would you be happy for me to pass your comments over to the boost devel list?

>> If you're not going to be removing regex all together, and you're not going 
>> to
>> write your own regex engine, so monotone will still depend on an external
>> library (e.g. pcre), why try and remove the dependency on the boost regex
>> library?
>
> boost::regex in particular has the additional problem of depending on
> libicu (if built that way) whether or not the Unicode interfaces are
> used.  (We don't.)  Libicu is huge, and has a bug that (on at least
> Linux and Solaris) renders ineffective all our efforts to keep thread
> overhead out of the C++ runtime.

If you don't need ICU, don't use it --- I never use it, so I don't compile
regex that way. I guess if you rely on system-supplied boost libraries then
you have to cope with what you're given, but that's true of any
system-supplied libraries. I understand from Nathaniel's post that
system-supplied versions of other libraries were causing problems, so they are
now packaged with monotone.

> It is also, itself, five times larger than libpcre.

Is that really a problem?

Anthony
-- 
Anthony Williams
Just Software Solutions Ltd - http://www.justsoftwaresolutions.co.uk
Registered in England, Company Number 5478976.
Registered Office: 15 Carrallack Mews, St Just, Cornwall, TR19 7UL