Boost makes building a piece of software much more difficult than
necessary. It's a huge library, and just uncompressing it takes a
considerable amount of time. MPD only used a tiny fraction of it, yet
its header bloat made the MPD build very slow. Locating Boost was
difficult due to its arcane build system and its resistance to use
pkg-config; it's always a special case. MPD could never use features
of newer Boost versions because Linux distributions always shipped old
Boost versions. Boost made everything complicated and slow.
So, finally, after getting rid of GLib (commit ccdb94b06c), switching
to C++ and using Boost (commit 0801b3f495), we've finally get rid of
it 8 years later.
Unfortunately, I had to reimplement parts of it along the way
(e.g. IntrusiveList). Kind of NIH, but on the other hand, compiling
MPD has become much easier for users.
So long, autotools! This is my last MPD related project to migrate
away from it. It has its strengths, but also very obvious weaknesses
and weirdnesses. Today, many of its quirks are not needed anymore,
and are cumbersome and slow. Now welcome our new Meson overlords!
