Re: [Boost-users] Too many library variants

On Mon, 14 Nov 2005 20:17:00 -0500, David Abrahams wrote

Rene Rivera writes:

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Merrill Cornish wrote:

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When I built Boost 1.33.0 for MinGW, I just specified the toolset. As a result I got 28! variants on the set of Boost libraries.

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From the various file names, I can figure out most of the variants:

d = debug mt = multi-threaded s = static but there are other variants which aren't as obvious.

It's all explained in http://www.boost.org/more/getting_started.html#Results.

Rene, I get the impression that 28 variants is a lot more than most people want, at least at first. Maybe we shouldn't build all of them by default, and just supply enough to "get started?"

I think at one point Doug suggested that a single variant is the most common case, and I agree. Or at least rewrite the getting started so the one selected variant case is trivial to understand. Just looking at this getting_started page...it really needs a more tutorial like...filled with examples style. For example, the type of question I'm asking as a developer when reading getting started is: "how do I get the thing to build multithreaded dlls with vc7.1 installed in c:\dev\boost_libs". There's nothing even close to that on the getting started page. Oh well, sorry to digress -- and no I'm not volunteering ;-) Jeff