This only just occurred to me, so I am not sure where I am going with it. I wanted to find out if people like the idea of a "Boost" type service for general/multi purpose C libraries.
I have not actually made much personal use of the boost libs (being pretty new to C++), but the idea reminded me much of perl's CPAN, which is probably the biggest collection of it's kind (there are 16,000 + library modules available on CPAN, and the CPAN module itself comes standard with perl and has a apt/yum like interface to fetch/build/install any CPAN library with a few simple commands). Of course, not everything there is to everyone's tastes, but it does mean contributions are held up to a well established community for scrutiny, possible development, and distribution.
Considering how incredible CPAN is and how apparently popular Boost is, it's amazing to me that there is not something parallel for most widely used languages.
I'd like to see it happen for C and have time to contribute, but there is no way for me as an individual to "make it so". Hence I'm also inviting ideas about how something like that might be established. I think it would have a much better chance of success if there were first some kind of discussion with the C community at large, rather than some small group going ahead and saying, "Look what we've done! Now everyone get with the program!". I'm not a follower of any general C programming mail lists, but if anyone knows of anywhere this might be well received, please speak up. You heard of it here first
