Any boost library should be straight forward to build if it's not header only.
Agreed, but bjam/jam/whatever is an impediment here. Boost is the only thing I've ever encountered that used this. CMake is the most widely used build environment now for C/C++ and the sooner we move to replacing bjam/jam/whatever with CMake, the sooner all this build suffering ends.
I must admit, I got pretty mystified when I first encountered bjam. The documentation isn't, well, good, or even existent in some areas. The central problem with boost is twofold - 1, if a library is header-only, then it's independent and that's *good*. 2, if a library is header-only, then it increases compile-times and that's *bad*. This is really a C++ problem, but one that a decent build system aught to fix eg. ninja, incredibuild, etc