Elisha Berns wrote:
(for whatever reason - such as bjam really is an incomprehensible tool and pain to script)
As someone who is far from an expert programmer or boost expert, I'd like to express a different opinion. bjam *is* difficult to learn at first. For me one reason was simply how alien it looks compared to an IDE or make. And until recently the documentation was simply incomprehensible. Although I'm really looking forward to the new documentation Dave is going to write, the existing documentation of Boost Build v2 is really not too bad for learning how to compile and link libraries and executables. If that's all you need to do, the documentation plus a few questions posted on the mailing list should get you up to speed. I agree there's a steep learning curve, but I found it surprisingly short. And once you've got the hang of it, building software on different platforms (I've done it on Windows, Linux, Solaris, MacOSX) is incredibly easy and can be done using a single Jamfile.