"Robert Ramey" <ramey@rrsd.com> writes:
It looks to me that the old system of using environmental variables has been preplaced with with the new user-config.jam system.
Not exactly. * There never was a "system of using environmental variables;" it was always a system of using Jam variables. It just so happens that, as with Make, Jam sucks its initial global variable values out of the environment. It has always been a principle of Boost.Build to avoid a design that forces the user to litter his environment with variable settings to make Boost.Build work. * user-config.jam and site-config.jam form a system for setting up a semi-permanent description of your system's configuration, e.g. what compilers and libraries you have installed, where they are, etc. There never really was a system for doing that with v1. What I did with v1 was to hack together a script called "myjam" that prepared a bunch of variable settings and then invoked bjam. * That is not the only way to configure your compilers; you can do it from the command-line unless you have a truly bizarre installation.
So it would seem that I have to edit user-config.jam to specify the paths of the vc compilers ( as well as others). On the other hand, there is no mention of anything like this in the "getting started" guide.
That's because you don't need to do it.
Indeed, invoking
bjam --v2 msvc-7.1 >bjam.log &
returns - among other things - warning: No toolsets are configured.
You're not following the guide. bjam --v2 toolset=msvc-7.1 ^^^^^^^^ will work.
So, the "getting started" guide seems incomplete to me.
I think you just started with a different set of directions and failed to read the guide carefully. -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting www.boost-consulting.com