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I'm very confused about the header hell in my boost/spirit directory. What's all this about?

The boost/spirit directory currently holds two versions of the Spirit library: Spirit.Classic (former V1.8.x) and SpiritV2. Both are completely independent and usually not used at the same time. Do not mix these two in the same grammar.

Spirit.Classic evolved over years in a fairly complex directory structure:

boost/spirit/actor
boost/spirit/attribute
boost/spirit/core
boost/spirit/debug
boost/spirit/dynamic
boost/spirit/error_handling
boost/spirit/iterator
boost/spirit/meta
boost/spirit/symbols
boost/spirit/tree
boost/spirit/utility

While introducing Spirit V2 we restructured the directory structure in order to accommodate two versions at the same time. All of Spirit.Classic now lives in the directory

boost/spirit/home/classic 

where the directories above contain forwarding headers to the new location allowing to maintain application compatibility. The forwarding headers issue a warning (starting with Boost V1.38) telling the user to change their include paths. Please expect the above directories/forwarding headers to go away soon.

This explains the need for the directory

boost/spirit/include

which contains forwarding headers as well. But this time the headers won't go away. We encourage application writers t use only the includes contained in this directory. This allows us to restructure the directories underneath if needed without worrying application compatibility. Please use those files in your application only. If it turns out that some forwarding file is missing, please report this as a bug.

Spirit V2 is not about parsing only anymore (as Spirit.Classic). It now consists out of 3 parts (sub-libraries): Spirit.Qi, Spirit.Karma, and Spirit.Lex. The header files for those live in

boost/spirit/home/qi
boost/spirit/home/karma
boost/spirit/home/lex

and have forwarding headers in

boost/spirit/include

Spirit.Qi is the direct successor to Spirit.Classic as it implements a DSEL (domain specific embedded language) allowing to write parsers using the syntax of C++ itself (parsers in the sense turning a sequence of bytes into an internal data structure). It is not compatible with Spirit.Classic, the main concepts are similar, though.

Spirit.Karma is the counterpart to Spirit.Qi. It implements a similar DSEL but for writing generators (i.e. the things turning internal data structures into a sequence of bytes, most of the time - strings). Spirit.Karma is the Yang to Spirit.Qi's Yin, it's almost like a mirrored picture.

Spirit.Lex is (as the name implies) a library allowing to write lexical analyzers. These are either usable standalone or can be used as a frontend for Spirit.Qi parsers. If you know flex you shouldn't have problems understanding Spirit.Lex. This library actually doesn't implement the lexer itself. All it does is to provide an interface to pre-existing lexical analyzers. Currently it's using Ben Hansons excellent Lexertl library (proposed for a Boost review, BTW) as its underlying workhorse.

Again, don't use any of the header files underneath the boost/spirit/home directory directly, always include files from the boost/spirit/include directory.

The last bit missing is Phoenix2 (which currently still lives under the Spirit umbrella, but already has been accepted as a Boost library, so it will move away). Phoenix2 is a library allowing to write functional style C++, which is interesting on itself, but as it initially has been developed for Spirit, it is nicely integrated and very useful when it comes to writing semantic actions. I think using the boost/spirit/include/phoenix_... headers will be safe in the future as well, as we will probably redirect to the Boost.Phoenix headers as soon as these are available.


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