[Nix-dev] Boost libraries

[Eelco Dolstra]

Hi Peter,

Peter Simons wrote:

>  | commit 9db32c5cf79c749d39a8fd3317ae6cc03bebde7c
>  | Author: eelco <eelco at 70bd8c7a-acb8-0310-9f0d-9cc1c95dcdbb>
>  | Date:   Fri Apr 3 23:54:20 2009 +0000
>  |
>  | * Boost: cut the installed size from 257 MB (!!!) to 58 MB. It
>  |   required all that space because it was building static/shared,
>  |   single-thread/multi-threaded, and debug/production versions of the
>  |   libraries - as well as every combination of those. Now we build
>  |   only the shared, multi-threaded, production version, which needs
>  |   only 8 MB. [...]
> 
> this change breaks my installation. I do need some of the variants that
> were deleted from the expression, i.e. the variants for single-threaded
> and debug builds. Arguably, it would be nice if the Boost expression
> would offer more granularity to allow depending on specific libraries in
> specific variants, but until we have that, removing arbitrary libraries
> from the installation doesn't sound like a good idea.

Then we definitely need to do it through a flag, which is easy to do.  (I really
don't want all those variants back in the default build, because it's crazy to
have a simple support library take up a quarter of a gigabyte.)  I'll have a
look at it.

>  | * Removed some Boost versions that aren't used anymore.
> 
> It feels odd that version 1.36.0 is still available, but (the newer)
> version 1.37.0 is not. What exactly does it mean for a package like
> Boost to be "unused"?

It's not referenced anywhere in Nixpkgs.  1.36.0 is still used by OpenOffice.

However, we need a policy on when to keep old versions around.

-- 
Eelco Dolstra | http://www.st.ewi.tudelft.nl/~dolstra/