Dear boosters, As a programmer under Unix-like systems, I really appreciate when a library (say `mylib') provides some `mylib-config' script that helps its users to build compiler flags. Several industrial strength libraries have such a tool: GSL, MySQL and, in the field of particle physics software I work: CLHEP, ROOT, CERNLIB... Here is an example for the GSL (GNU Scientific Library):
$ gsl-config Usage: gsl-config [OPTION]
Known values for OPTION are: --prefix show GSL installation prefix --libs print library linking information, with cblas --libs-without-cblas print library linking information, without cblas --cflags print pre-processor and compiler flags --help display this help and exit --version output version information An external CBLAS library can be specified using the GSL_CBLAS_LIB environment variable. The GSL CBLAS library is used by default. <<< I makes really easy to write rather portable makefiles using things like: CPPFLAGS+=$(shell gsl-config --cflags) LDFLAGS+=$(shell gsl-config --libs) Up to now and AFAIK it seems Boost does not provide such script that could be generated at build stage for any Unix-like system. Of course, I wrote my own script for my own usage (and for people who work with me). But at the end, I think it would be better to use an `official' tool. For my experience, it is also a strong argument to convince newbies to use Boost on top of standard C++, because it comes in some rather transparent way. So I have a few questions: - Is there such a script hidden in the Boost source tree? - If not, is there any plan to provide one? - Is someone else interested with it? Thank you very much for your comments. [hope this topic has not been addressed in the past! I apologize in advance for that!] regards frc [PS: I previously posted this mail within the wrong thread... sorry!] -- F.Mauger