Provide minimal boost version with limited functionality

[lenaploetzke]

Feature description

Provide a minimal boost version. Functionality that requires more boost parts than provided should not be built. This currently affects some functions in the file epidemiology/state_age_function.h.

Discussion: Where should the minimal boost version be stored? Ideally not as .tar.gz in the repository as before.

Additional context

No response

Checklist

• Attached labels, especially loc:: or model:: labels.
• Linked to project.

[reneSchm]

Maybe we can use FetchContent instead of a zip file:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/72913306/how-to-use-boost-libraries-directly-from-github-using-cmake-fetchcontent-or-any

This could also work for the full download as well, by just changing the included libraries. If FetchContent is fast enough, I would prefer it over providing a binary archive. The zip archive obscures the dependency, and as far as I can tell from a quick search the opinion on how to handle dependencies in git(hub) is not to.

Anyways, github does have a solution for large file storage, which we could use for storing an archive.

Further, there is a cache action to reuse dependencies across runs, but I am not sure whether it applies to us, since we do not use a dependency manager like npm.

[lenaploetzke]

Maybe we can use FetchContent instead of a zip file: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/72913306/how-to-use-boost-libraries-directly-from-github-using-cmake-fetchcontent-or-any

This could also work for the full download as well, by just changing the included libraries. If FetchContent is fast enough, I would prefer it over providing a binary archive. The zip archive obscures the dependency, and as far as I can tell from a quick search the opinion on how to handle dependencies in git(hub) is not to.

FetchContent is used in #983 and takes quite a long time

[reneSchm]

I think that version downloads all of boost, in the stackoverflow link they seem to only download some of the boost libraries. It might be worth a try.

[mknaranja]

@reneSchm

• Daniel had been playing around with caching here: Explore using ccache for CI pipeline #305
• GitLFS is for several reasons probably not the right solution. It has to be paid for space and traffic.