David Abrahams wrote:
Hi,
On the Boost.Build list we were just discussing the fact that some people otherwise inclined towards Boost have chosen Scons over Boost.Build. It would be useful for us to understand some of the reasons why, if some of you wouldn't mind letting us know. No flames, please!
As far as the 'kernel' is concerned, I don't actually care as much whether it is Scons or bjam or whatever. The single most important aspect to me is the user interface, i.e. the language to write Makefiles in. I very much like the idea of making this language python. Unfortunately even scons use a pretty non-pythonic approach for how to write Sconscripts. But still, it is python, and thus easily extensible by anybody with a minimal efford. On the other hand, I find Jamfile syntax quite hard to read. I'm not sure about the current state of its documentation, but the very fact that it is a new language to learn is unfortunate. I very much like the idea of a framework of toolchains as provided by boost.build, and I have proposed to port it to scons in the past. I also like the high-level approach of boost.build to provide a number of (naming and file system) conventions to make the life of everybody easier. I don't understand the boost.build architecture well enough to know which of the above is about bjam, and which about boost.build (or, what boost.build really stands for in the first place). I believe a good essay discussing the boost.build design from a user's perspective would help. In particular, as boost.build is known as the 'build system for the boost libraries' (which may be a misconception) it would help to understand the various components of boost.build, how they interact, and how users can modify them to suite their own project's needs. For example: * Can boost.build be used to build boost-unrelated projects ? * Can boost.build be used to build python projects (or any language in fact) ? * Is boost.build flexible enough to adapt to conventions that may exist when building software using language XYZ ? * Can boost.build be used to package software (similar to python's distutils) ? * How flexible is boost.build with respect to the build tree directory structure and file names ? Regards, Stefan