FAQ

[grisumbras]

There is a list of questions people have about Boost. Often these questions take the form of criticisms, because people don't understand the reasons for why Boost maintainers do things one way and not the other. There should be a FAQ page where these questions are answered and criticisms are addressed.

[grisumbras]

Examples by @pdimov:

"why is boost using b2, isn't that a hassle?" (answer: b2 builds multiple variants at once, the cmake configs support that)

"how can I build boost with cmake, using my custom toolchain?" - point to boostorg/cmake/README

"muh monolith" - when a company gives green light on the monolith / you invest the initial time to integrate the monolith, you get all of the things for no additional cost

"why boost instead of std" - regex, unordered, etc

[grisumbras]

Paradoxically, another criticism I've heard: Boost is not monolithic enough, that is, rather than using submodules it should use a monorepo.

[pdimov]

https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/130bzj8/comment/jhxgxi8/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

[alandefreitas]

This page already exists although it doesn't have any content yet. It's site-pages/help.adoc and will get rendered here as a FAQ in the top level of the website hierarchy. This is for more generic criticism. Maybe it should be site-pages/FAQ.adoc. I don't know.

Other common criticisms are being addressed in the corresponding pages, like in the Getting Started guide, which now mentions boostdep, cmake, and even package managers. The FAQ can (should?) also include links to these more specific pages.

[grisumbras]

Yeah, definitely should.

[PeterTurcan]

@grisumbras @alandefreitas @pdimov
I created this FAQ and added it to the User Guide: https://docs.cppalliance.org/user-guide/faq.html
Should this be moved to the Help page and the questions/answers above added? Or do you have something different in mind for the Help page?

[alandefreitas]

Vinnie wanted that in user-pages because the website will take it from there and render it somewhere else. To avoid duplicate work, you can create a symlink from the page in user-pages into the antora partials directory and just include that partial in the faq.adoc of the user guide.