Hi, I do not have time to read through this thread completely, but here couple notes: 1. There is no sense IMO comparing bjam with autoconfig. It's apples and oranges. bjam is make substitution. The only advantage of make is that it's already present in most systems. We chose bjam over make for reasons (look into bjam docs for some them) that included better flexibility, portability and expression power. 2. Boost..Build could be considered as a counterpart to autoconfig. These two follow different ideology: Boost.Build present precreated configuration files (tools definition) while autoconfig allows to generate these from some source pattern based on system characteristics. I personally prefer preexistent files if it possible. 3. I personally don't see what this "installation fuss" is all about. in majority of the cases the whole installation is: "pkzip -d boost.zip" or similar. Providers of "packages" could do whatever they want and add build steps. This is a bit oversimplification. but I do not see need for better installation (whatever this means) as a showstopper in any form. Regards, Gennadiy