On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 08:40:35PM -0500, Michael Shell wrote: > > As one example, I looked a bit into that libboost thing Inkscape > requires: > > http://www.boost.org/ > > and what it is about: > > http://www.boost.org/users/proposal.pdf > > It seems to be a large collection of all kinds of C++ libraries > that have little in common other than someone once felt the need to > create them and somebody else thought that someone else might > have a use for them. And quoting the above PDF: > > "Must a library do useful work? No. A library meant as a teaching > example or demonstration might not actually do any work, but > that is fine if the peer reviewers support it." > > The general view of boost is that it contains things which will probably end up in the c++ standard. Even if you abhor that language, it's what most graphical apps are developed in. > A 20MB+ tar ball of this stuff to get Inkscape up. Heck, the > install boost RPMs I see on the net are 100MB+. > > It seems to me this library was intended for use in software > development, not for run-time linking by production applications.
A false division - if you program in c++ and want to use the things provided by it (instead of writing your own, probably buggier, versions *if* you have enough developers), you have to use it. Just like the toolkits - use what is available instead of reinventing a wheel. As to space, it's much smaller if you drop the static libs and the debug versions of the libs. > Because it is released under a *very* free license, people are free > to grab only the parts they need out of it and pull them into their > own source tree. But, IMHO, app developers should not (at least today) > require that libboost-X.so be available on all client systems. If you don't like the dependencies, don't build the application! The only thing I use that needs boost is gnash. At least boost is now much better behaved for those of us who build from source (compare an old fedora srpm from a couple of years ago, to see the hoops they had to jump through in the install), although it still insists on installing static libs, as do so many other packages - my buildscripts are now wise to them, so I've stopped worrying about that. The other recent change with boost is that its wiki seems to be up to date and generally points towards the required answers without very much bang-head-against-brick-wall action. ĸen -- das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
