Rationale for removing namespace customization and amalgamated header?

[gitamohr]

These two features were important to our decision to adopt PEGTL, since they made it easy to embed in our project. I'm curious what was the motivation for removing these features?

[ColinH]

The amalgamated header was removed because (a) we don't see much value in it, if you can copy one header you can copy a directory of them (for us the dividing line for ease-of-use is header-only vs. needs-to-be-compiled), (b) there are several choices of what all to include (no pun intended) or not; if contrib is part of the amalgamated header then you pull in ICU (!) and iostream as dependencies which not everybody will want ... and (c) it was more work to maintain than one might think.

The namespace customisation was originally introduced shortly after placing a copy of the PEGTL in taoJSON, i.e. to prevent a clash when a project uses both the PEGTL and taoJSON where the latter embeds a different version of the former. Now that we are using submodules it didn't seem to be necessary anymore. What is your use case for this feature?

[gitamohr]

That's great, thank you very much indeed!

[ColinH]

Can you continue to work with the PEGTL if we don't make an amalgamated header again?

[gitamohr]

With the ability to customize the namespace, I think so. I can try to see what our embedding would look like without an amalgamated header and report back if I encounter any problems.

[ColinH]

The customisable namespace is back in the main branch, hopefully 100% compatible to the previous version. We'll continue to hope that the missing amalgamated header won't be a problem.

[gitamohr]

We just moved from 2.x to 3.x, and in that process we switched away from using the amalgamated header with no problems. The namespace customization is working perfectly. Thanks again!