Steve Byan
On Jan 30, 2006, at 11:17 AM, David Abrahams wrote:
What do you wish someone had explained to you?
It would be nice to update the installation documentation to point out that at least the latest distribution includes bjam, so one doesn't need to download it separately,
If you mean the latest release of Boost, then it has always included the bjam sources, but has never included a bjam executable. I think it's pretty clear from the docs that the sources for bjam are part of the Boost release, isn't it? The need to build a tool just to be able to build boost was seen as anathema to many people (different programming cultures have different needs), so the Getting Started guide strongly encouraged downloading a prebuilt bjam executable. If you're talking about some distribution of Boost packaged for installation on, say, Debian or RedHat, then those are not prepared by the Boost developers and historically we have taken no responsibility for their contents. That actually *ought* to be made clear in our docs and we ought to coordinate with the maintainers of those distros to make sure there are appropriate instructions for their users on our website. I'll definitely mention that in my talk.
and that the config script in at least the latest distribution will build bjam and create makefiles which will invoke the built bjam executable to build and install Boost.
Doc patches are always welcome. My improvements will probably come in the form of an article. I'll certainly mention in my talk that there's a configure script for those who are comfortable with ./configure && make && make install Thanks for your feedback. -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting www.boost-consulting.com