As has been reported in a few places, Boost is transitioning from Subversion to Git. The Boost Steering Committee has voted to “push the button” which amounts to shutting down the SVN repository and making a final run of the conversion script. There are a lot of details available on the Boost wiki.
The motivating issue for this transition is not just to see Boost move to a repository system that has become the de facto standard for open source projects, but to support better modularity for the Boost Libraries. Boost policy has been to encourage developers to depend on existing Boost libraries rather than to “re-invent the wheel.” But this leads to a lot of intra-library dependencies that discourage users that may be interested in only a small number of libraries.
Moving to Git doesn’t solve this problem, but it does move in the direction of modularity which is more and more important as the number of Boost libraries grows. (When I first visited boost.org, there were four libraries. Now I count one hundred twenty-six libraries.)
I want to make a big shout out to everyone that has worked to make this transition possible. I wish I new all the names, but some of the ones that I do know are: Dave Abrahams, Daniel Pfeifer, John Wiegley, and Beman Dawes. If you know someone who helped with this transition, please add a comment.
My goal is to update this blog every Tuesday, but next Tuesday I’ll be having major surgery so it is unlikely that I’ll online for awhile. If I don’t have something up by Monday night, it will likely be a while.
