[geos-devel] boost

[strk at refractions.net]

On Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 12:38:06PM +0100, Stefan Zschocke wrote:
> Well I am a newcomer, thus my opinion should not count much, anyway here it
> comes:
> I think the source-folder should only contain the core files needed to build
> the geos-library.
> Then another folder should take the testing stuff and also the examples,
> which currently are inside the source-folder tree.

This has changed in the HEAD branch.
If you want to help here is a summary of what's going on:

	- GEOS is known to be slow
	- GEOS is known to be complex (probably unnecessarily)
	- GEOS ABI was too weak, thus we provided 
	  a C-API interface to keep binary compatibility
	  in the long term
	- All love is in HEAD branch, where C++ ABI is being
	  happily braking aiming at performance improvements,
	  this is also where big cleanups and simplifications
	  are to converge.

For the specific case, in HEAD branch source/ only contain core
files, which is what JTS provides in src/com/vividsolution/jts.

Tests have been moved to tests/ directory (out of source/)
and C-API has been moved to capi/ (out of source/).

> If the testing code has depencies on boot - fine - as long as the core files
> for the library (or dll on Windows) don't have them.

This will likely be the first step. The configure script will
check for boost availability and skip unit tests build.
Anyway, given the premises above, having boost as a requirement
for the core library might help in reducing complexity (of
tracking allocations, mostly) and possibly improving performance.

--strk;