Re: [cpp-netlib-devel] Compile-time Reduction Effort

[Glyn M. <gly...@gm...>]

On 25 October 2010 21:20, Nelson, Erik - 2
<eri...@ba...>wrote:

> >>Erik Nelson wrote:
> >>Compile time *is* an important issue, but the beauty of a header library
> >>is that there is no install step- you just copy the files into your
> >>directory tree.
>
> >Glyn Matthews wrote:
> >But there is an install step, because of the dependencies that cpp-netlib
> has - and will have: in developing the XMPP client I'll be linking to an XML
> parser >library and TLS library.  Other protocol implementations will bring
> other dependencies and we'll have to deal with those too.
>
> Right now, the only required dependency that cpp-netlib has is boost,
> right?  All I did to start using it was to copy it into my boost
> distribution.  Granted, boost has an install step, but incrementally adding
> cpp-netlib (or updating to a newer version) just means copying header files
> right now.  That makes it very easy to install/upgrade (unless you don't
> have boost yet).
>
>
Right now, yes.  And that's OK if you're already familiar with Boost (which
is not always the case).  But my main objection was motivated by trying to
use dependencies outside Boost such as XML or cryptography libraries (I'd
love to see Boost.XML or Boost.Crypto but we can't wait for these).  CMake
helps a lot here but it's easy to imagine that as the project grows the
install/upgrade procedure needs to be managed very carefully too.  IMO,
libraries ought to be preferred to PCHs in this case.

As a side note, maybe I can advertise what I've started for the XMPP
client: http://github.com/glynos/cpp-netlib/tree/xmpp to let others know
what kind of issues I am facing, and maybe I ought to start a new discussion
to make progress on this.

G