Subject: Re: [boost] bpm, a tool to install a modular Boost distribution
From: Peter Dimov (lists_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-01-05 15:52:50
Daniel James wrote:
> A lot of things in tools (e.g. inspect, boostbook, quickbook) aren't
> needed by users, they mainly need to be there because Boost.Build expects
> them to be.
That is the reason. We could leave the tools in their separate repositories
under boostorg without making them submodules, but they won't build unless
put into tools/. And if a tool X requires another tool Y for some reason,
that other tool would also need to be in tools/Y for tools/X/build/Jamfile
to find it. It's certainly more convenient for people using the development
source tree for the tools to be there by default, kept up to date by git
pull && git submodule update --init, switched to master/develop as
appropriate, and so on.
Although you are right that putting bpm into a release may not be of much
use, except for users who want to look at its (officially released) source.
And now that you've brought it up, I see that the release doesn't contain
libs/*/include, so boostdep wouldn't work on it as well. I hadn't realized
that. :-/