I'm working on modified Kneser-Ney estimation using bounded memory but it depends on a Boost released in the last year. Would you take that trade, installing Boost so you don't have to install SRILM or IRSTLM? > Kenneth, > > I completely sympathize with you. Unfortunately, there are places > (such as where I work) where stability is important, and a major > mechanism for achieving stability is the use of an enterprise-level > Linux distro; such distros by design use older versions of most > software. > > I have frequently found myself being the voice pushing for more recent > software, and in fact we are (very slowly) transitioning to a more > modern distro. But the point remains that there is value in being able > to compile Moses on older distributions (like Centos 5.x) and newer > platforms (like iOS and Android). There are probably many similarly trapped people. I remember the pain that Tim Anderson went through with MEMT. Few of them seem to be taking the survey, but they'll probably start shouting if/when Moses starts depending on Boost.
So far as compiling for a "new" platform, it's not hard to compile Boost for ARM once you're already doing the cross-compile legwork. > I haven't been involved in the Moses coding surrounding multithreading > and its use of Boost. While there is value in the ability to compile > Moses on the platforms I mentioned above, Hieu's point is very valid - > it would be much better from a testing and bug-prevention perspective > to have fewer code paths to examine. It may even be that this factor > is important enough to justify changes that would make it harder or > impossible to compile on less used, older platforms. Also, I'm tired of reimplementing Boost. > I guess my main point is that as decisions are made, keep in mind how > those changes will affect users on older distribution, as well as > development on newer platforms. > > I like your suggestion of using only Boost headers instead of Boost > libraries for any mandatory Boost dependencies. Anybody else want to comment? I'm looking forward to some scoped_ptr and unordered_map. Functionally, the build process for unfortunate users looks like this: wget -O - http://sourceforge.net/projects/boost/files/boost/1.47.0/boost_1_47_0.tar.bz2/download |tar xj export CPATH=$PWD/boost_1_47_0 cd mosesdecoder ./regenerate-makefiles.sh ./configure make -j8 > As far as multi-threaded versus single-threaded, I am fine with > removing the single-threaded option if that would make development and > maintenance easier. (Now that I've said that, does multi-threading > depend on Boost?) Multi-threading is implemented using Boost threads. > Cheers, > Lane _______________________________________________ Moses-support mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/moses-support
