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

[asfimport]

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.

Reporter: Neal Richardson / @nealrichardson
Assignee: Neal Richardson / @nealrichardson

Related issues:

• [C++/R] Namespace vendored Boost (is related to)

PRs and other links:

• GitHub Pull Request #6734

_{Note: This issue was originally created as ARROW-8222. Please see the migration documentation for further details.}

[asfimport]

Wes McKinney / @wesm:

We would need a place to host this tarball

You can host it as an artifact in a GitHub release. So we could put the bcp generator script in the Arrow repo and then use it to create the release artifact in a for-this-purpose GitHub repo

[asfimport]

Wes McKinney / @wesm:
To collect some anecdotal evidence about problems with the current boost_ep. It seems the entire boostorg has some kind of rate limiting issue on Bintray and trying to access e.g. https://dl.bintray.com/boostorg/release/1.72.0/source/boost_1_72_0.tar.gz yields 403 Forbidden. So all the more reason to host our EP artifact on GitHub or some other place within our agency

[asfimport]

Wes McKinney / @wesm:
Issue resolved by pull request 6734
#6734