From: John Maddock (john_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-02-07 05:20:46
>> If you run bcp, every library shows up as depending on test and mpl
>
> I don't think so. When I tried it yesterday there was no mention of
> Boost.Test headers in the Boost.Parameter dependency report.
It depends how you run it: basically it scans files for file dependencies
so:
If you pass it a list of *library names* to scan, and those libraries have
tests that depend on "whatever" (Boost.Test etc) then you get a very fat
dependency graph. However if you're more disciminating and pass the name of
the headers you use, then you get a list of dependencies for those headers,
for example:
bcp --list regex => Big fat list including Boost.Test and Boost.Thread
bcp --list regex.hpp => Slimline list, just what the headers and source
depend on.
bcp --scan --list myfile.cpp => Whatever Boost headers/source myfile.cpp
depends on.
And yes this is all in the docs :-)
Also don't forget that the output from bcp is made more verbose by the need
to create a dependency chart that works for any compiler: your specific
compiler may need only a fraction of what bcp reports, in some cases anyway.
Someone asked about producing a library dependency chart: there are two
problems with that:
There are many libraries that depend on just one or two files in otherwise
quite large libraries such as MPL, Preprocessor, Type Traits etc. Do these
depend on those libraries?
It's quite hard to map some header files (those direcly in boost/) to
library names: we could make a manual list to do the job, but it would be a
non-stop job keeping it up to date.
What I will investigate though is collapsing the output from bcp --list so
that
boost/foo/* all map to a single entry boost/foo
libs/foo/* all map to a single entry libs/foo
which would cut down the list output a lot.
John.