Well, personally, I don't want that dependency. It would mean dropping support for particular legacy OSes, where Open Babel has compiled without trouble until now (similarly the CXX11 requrest). As I see it, users of Open Babel will see no benefit from us using Boost, but will find it more difficult to compile.
Turning it around, is it reasonable to add a requirement for Boost just to read in a particular file format? I'm happy to work with you to remove Boost from your codebase if that would help. Regards, - Noel On Mon, 10 Jun 2019 at 13:45, Patrick Lorton <klor...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hello all - I just put together a pull request > <https://github.com/openbabel/openbabel/pull/1993>to add maestro file > parsing support (using maeparser > <https://github.com/schrodinger/maeparser>) to OpenBabel. Geoff pointed > out in the pull request that Boost is not currently a requirement of > OpenBabel, and that it was not clear if it's a good idea to make it one. > > I'm curious what the current opinions would be towards making Boost a > requirement of OpenBabel? RDKit has had a semi-optional Boost requirement > for a while (including for its use of maeparser now), so OpenBabel wouldn't > be alone amongst Chemistry packages. > > As long as someone's not using cutting edge Boost features, it seems a > guarantee for package managers to have working versions of Boost available > (including Conda of course). > > There's some 'in the middle' options: detecting whether Boost is already > installed, and only building Maestro support in if it's already available; > or having maeparser just off by default and allow people to turn it on > (also turning Boost requirement on). I think those options would > effectively turn maeparser off for the vast majority of users who would be > using OpenBabel from a package built with minimum dependencies. > > I'm personally advocating for adding a default-boost-requirement that > could be turned off by turning maeparser off, but am of course at the > service of the project owners :) > > Looking forward to any thoughts/discussions, > Pat > _______________________________________________ > OpenBabel-Devel mailing list > OpenBabel-Devel@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/openbabel-devel >
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