AMDG Jean-Louis Leroy wrote:
After more hours on this I still cannot make it work.
I have tried again from scratch. I have unpacked the 1.40 distro in \temp and built boost.filesystem from within the boost tree (it's the project I used as a template for rdb). It builds ok. Then I copied libs\filesystem to \temp and created an empty Jamroot and a boost-build.jam in its root dir, containing:
boost-build C:/TEMP/boost_1_40_0/tools/build/v2 ;
This is coherent with the post I found on the internet, with Steve's recommandations, and http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_40_0/doc/html/bbv2/reference.html
However when I try bjam from \temp\filesystem\build I get the message: rule boost-install unknown in module Jamfile</C:/TEMP/filesystem/build>
I put my boost-build.jam at the top of the boost tree and tried again building from inside the tree with `bjam -d+5`. It built ok and I could see in the log that my boost-build.jam was picked:
jambase.c:72:>> local boost-build-files = C:\TEMP\boost_1_40_0\boost-build.jam jambase.c:75:>> set .boost-build-file = C:\TEMP\boost_1_40_0\boost-build.jam
...so it looks like the content is correct. Then I sought where the boost-install rule pops into existence. This seems to happen here:
C:/TEMP/boost_1_40_0/tools/build/v2/kernel\modules.jam:170:>>>>|>>>>|>>>>|>>>>|>>>> local rules = using import project constant path-constant use-project build-project explicit glob glob-tree conditional option handle-static-runtime libraries-to-install tag make-unversioned-links boost-install
Examining `modules.jam` suggests that a bunch of build rules are dynamically extracted from all the libs in the tree and boost-install is one of them.
boost-install is defined in the boost Jamroot. I had forgotten that libraries with separate source use boost-install. It isn't really used for anything. I'm not sure that it will work correctly outside the boost tree, so you can safely define it in your Jamroot to do nothing.
So at this point my understanding is that there are two things going on: getting bjam to work - it seems to be dynamic in part, it locates and loads "a" build system ; Steve told me how to make that part work. The second thing is to use it to build a /boost lib/ with its dependencies (in my case the test harness) from elsewhere. In fact my initial post should have been entitled "Boost lib outside Boost tree", and not merely "Bjam outside...".
Is this picture correct? Does any of the lib authors ever build from outside a boost tree?
In Christ, Steven Watanabe