Hi Noel - after discussing it more, I think we're pretty committed to having a Boost dependency in maeparser. Even with our current boost requirement, maeparser already compiles on where we "draw the line" for old platforms: CentOS 6, released 8 years ago, the oldest CentOS still getting security updates, 1 year left until EOL. We like the functionality Boost provides and don't really want to reinvent all the wheels we'd have to in order to rip it out, as it does seem pretty standard at this point.
My proposal is not that it'd be difficult to build or package OpenBabel without Boost/maeparser, just that if you wanted to do so you'd have to explicitly add -DMAEPARSER=off to the cmake build. For really old platforms or those that wanted to build without the boost dependency, I think that's still pretty straightforward. This would also disable the C++11 requirement as well. The other option is to have it default to -DMAEPARSER=off, but from our experience I do honestly believe far far more users have boost or have boost trivially available than don't, so I'm (for obvious reasons) biased towards having it exposed by default. Splitting the baby would be to check for Boost and turn off maeparser if Boost isn't available, my worry there is that package maintainers would default to leaving it off and not add boost as a requirement, effectively disabling this feature for most users. Pat On Tue, Jun 11, 2019 at 5:32 AM Noel O'Boyle <baoille...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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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