Systemtap appears to support boost, however it is not a required dependency. The problem with this is that there is no flag to enable/disable boost support in the upstream `./configure`, so whether boost support gets enabled or disabled is up to the user having boost installed or not. Without diving into the sources in detail, it is not clearly evident what the purpose of boost is, especially since it's not a requirement in systemtap. With the recent =dev-util/systemtap-4.7-r1 bump, boost was added as a required dependency, which causes this hefty dep to be pulled in even though it doesn't seem required as systemtap both builds and works fine without it. Reproducible: Always
holger: any idea if the fallback path w/o boost is problematic, and also if can use a cache variable to hackily make it optional?
(In reply to Sam James from comment #1) > holger: any idea if the fallback path w/o boost is problematic, and also if > can use a cache variable to hackily make it optional? The use of boost seems to have been there forever: https://sourceware.org/git/?p=systemtap.git&a=search&h=HEAD&st=commit&s=boost but the only real explanation for its use that I have found is at: https://sourceware.org/git/?p=systemtap.git;a=blob;f=NEWS;h=8169e9c855d7a697ba068023031a96e185aa8202;hb=HEAD#l781 and https://sourceware.org/git/?p=systemtap.git;a=blob;f=INTERNALS;h=bc1203c444fbfc164c87c62281e0bef3449ad83c;hb=HEAD#l138 meaning its's for an optimization. Without boost it might just be slower/use more RAM. There really seems to be no way to explicitly build with or without boost. No good idea how to fix that.
