Christopher Jefferson wrote:
On 28 Jul 2009, at 11:46, Vladimir Prus wrote:
KTC wrote:
Users on Microsoft Windows should be able to build boost with everything, both in terms of all supported variants and all boost libraries, with a single command to bjam assuming they have all the optional supporting libraries available.
An user download boost, and want to build all the libraries that require building go read the Getting Started Guide <.../getting_started/windows.html#invoke-bjam> and see the after getting bjam they use the command bjam --build-dir=build-directory toolset=toolset-name --build-type=complete stage
So they enter that into the command prompt and see lots of warnings and notes about missing optional components. The warnings and notes itself is fine and informative. Actually, it's incomplete as it stand as it doesn't tell the user about Boost.IOStreams optional component requirement of bzip2 & zlib headers. Okay, the user go and install all the optional components the warnings and notes tell them. After installing Python, ICU (building it first), Expat (building it first), and MPI (say MS-MPI), they try again. This time with the command becoming bjam --toolset=... --build-dir=... --build-type=complete - sHAVE_ICU=1 -sICU_PATH="..." -sEXPAT_INCLUDE="..." -sEXPAT_LIBPATH="..." -sBZIP2_SOURCE="..." -sZLIB_SOURCE="..." stage
Nope, MPI requires modification of user-config.jam or building it on its own with --with-mpi. Why? No other optional components build that way. So they look to see how they do that, and does it.
Do you actually want Boost.MPI? I kinda expect anybody who wants to use Boost.MPI to already have MPI installed.
Then, why not have boost try to detect MPI, and then build/install Boost.MPI in that case automatically?
On Mac OS X, MPI is installed as a system library, yet I still have to document and describe the unusual procedure required to install boost.MPI to users. This single feature has left us close to dumping Boost.MPI in favour of another option.
Just to clarify -- the procedure is putting one line in user-config.jam, most likely just: using mpi ; ? It's also documented at http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_39_0/doc/html/mpi/getting_started.html#mpi.c... If you are saying that the above does not work, can you file an issue? If you are saying that the above should be automated, can you file an issue as well? - Volodya