[ARROW-8222] [C++] Use bcp to make a slim boost for bundled build

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 0.17.0
• Component/s: C++
• Labels: pull-request-available
• External issue URL: https://github.com/apache/arrow/issues/24419
• Assignee: Neal Richardson
• Reporter: Neal Richardson
• Created: 25/Mar/20 22:34
• Updated: 11/Jan/23 07:58
• Resolved: 30/Mar/20 03:24

Description

We don't use much of Boost (just system, filesystem, and regex), but when we do a bundled build, we still download and extract all of boost. The tarball itself is 113mb, expanded is over 700mb. This can be slow, and it requires a lot of free disk space that we don't really need.

bcp is a boost tool that lets you extract a subset of boost, resolving any of its necessary dependencies across boost. The savings for us could be huge:

mkdir test
./bcp system.hpp filesystem.hpp regex.hpp test
tar -czf test.tar.gz test/

The resulting tarball is 885K (kilobytes!).

bcp also lets you re-namespace, so this would (IIUC) solve ARROW-4286 as well.

We would need a place to host this tarball, and we would have to updated it whenever we (1) bump the boost version or (2) add a new boost library dependency. This patch would of course include a script that would generate the tarball. Given the small size, we could also consider just vendoring it.

Issue Links

• is related to: ARROW-4286 [C++/R] Namespace vendored Boost
• links to: GitHub Pull Request #6734