On Thursday 24 June 2004 8:44 pm, Mathew Robertson wrote:
Can a make a few small suggestions...
Suggestions are *always* welcome.
To allow the autoconf tools (ie configure) to detect the presence of the various Boost libs and header file versions, would it be possible to add a C-linkage function to each libraries' source file(s). This would allow users to add a configure check which detects if a particular library instance is installed. For example, we add the following code to each library instance:
extern "C" boost_autoconf() {}
This allows autoconf users to add a test to their configure.in script:
AC_CHECK_LIB(boost_regex,boost_autoconf,...,[Boost::Regex library not found])
The extern simply needs to be added to one of the top cpp files in each library.
As Vladimir points out, we'll need to include the name of the lib in that, e.g., boost_regex_autoconf or boost_threads_autoconf.
Would it be possible to get bjam to detect the system installed compiler, then if it matched the "-sTOOLS=xxx" name, then it would install a version of the target libraries which doesn't include the compiler name? eg installing Boost results in libraries names like "libboost_signals-gcc.so" - it would be useful to install a library names like "libboost_signals.so". The main reason is that when you build your application, 'make' will use the $(CC) value (which is often 'gcc', 'aCC', 'cc', etc) automatically dependant on the platform - the application doesn't care which compiler it is built with, it only cares that it is the 'default system compiler'.
bjam doesn't seem to have the notion of a "system compiler", but it seems that we could have an "install-as-system" step that would do this.
Boost installs its include files in $PREFIX/include/boost-<version>/boost (where prefix is something like /usr/local). Would it be possible to install a symlink which effestively implements:
cd $PREFIX/include ln -s boost-<version>/boost boost
but only if the symlink didn't already exist. This would allow users to do a default/generic install of Boost, without them need to specify the specific version of the libraries within their build/make system.
Sounds like a good idea...
Finally (if there isn't a technique to do this already), would it be possible for the main boost/config.hpp to include a version number as a #define (or something similar), so the the application build tools could detect the whether the installed version is sufficient.
You want boost/version.hpp, which defines the BOOST_VERSION and BOOST_LIB_VERSION macros for this purpose. The file itself describes the (simple) encoding used. Doug