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

[Stephen Leake]

"Justin Patrin" <address@hidden> writes:

> IIRC there are 2 major reasons we're trying to remove the non-geader
> stuff in boost.
>
> 1) It's a huge stumbling block for people installing monotone. Boost
> tends to be a huge pain to build for many people on many platforms.
> This seems to have gotten better recently but still tends to be the
> most mentioned problem with getting monotone built.

This true for me.

On Windows, it was not a problem; there is a binary for Boost/Mingw.

But I'm trying to port monotone to Lynx (www.lynuxworks.com; a
real-time OS I use at work), and compiling Boost for that was a pain.
I did succeed.

> 2) Boost is large and takes quite a bit to compile and brings in some
> *large* libraries for the few places we need it. Replacing it with our
> own alternatives or slimmer, more ubiquitous, libraries will reduce
> the memory footprint of monotone and make it easier to get it running
> with smaller dependencies.

One thing that would help here is for the monotone INSTALL file to
list the exact Boost libraries needed, and for the Boost install
instructions to be clearer about how to compile only certain
libraries.

That said, since monotone uses Gnu configure, and Boost does not, it
will always be a problem. If pcre uses Gnu configure, that is a very
good reason to switch to it.

Another good reason to switch is the availability of binary releases.
Ludovic Brenta reports that binaries are available for pcre on most
Linux distributions. For Windows, the MinGW web page (www.mingw.org)
shows libgnurx as a contributed package, but not pcre. There is a
Cygwin binary for pcre.

I'm sure it's possible for someone to contribute a binary for pcre to
the mingw project.

--
-- Stephe