Getting Started with Modular Boost Library Maintenance

This page describes the mechanics of maintaining a Boost library using Git and Modular Boost.

The intended audience is developers involved in the maintenance of existing Boost libraries.

Prerequisites

• A recent version of the Git version control system. Read about Getting Started with Git. If you are new to Git, install it and experiment a bit before coming back here.

• A (free) ​GitHub account. Read about Getting Started with GitHub.

• Your favorite compiler and development environment installed and working smoothly.

• Modular Boost installed as described in Getting Started with Modular Boost. Be sure to run the suggested libs/system/tests tests to be sure your installation and compiler are working together.

• b2 is in your path. That allows most of the command line examples given here to work on both Windows and POSIX-like systems.

Verify Tests Working

Before making any changes to you library, which we will call "mylib", be sure the test suite is working in the modular Boost environment:

cd /modular-boost/libs/mylib
git checkout develop
cd test
b2

The results should be the same as trunk tests before the conversion. If they aren't, you probably want to resolved that before proceeding.

Fix a simple bug

These commands could be used for any Git project, modular or not, so hopefully you are already familiar with them:

cd /modular-boost/libs/mylib
git checkout develop
# make edits
# test
git commit -a -m "my bug fix"
git push origin develop

Simple bugs are usually fixed on the develop branch - there is usually no need to first create a bug-fix branch.