On 07/20/2010 12:45 PM, Vladimir Prus wrote:
I am sure that most of you got accustomed to typing "bjam" in console whenever you want to build things. This name is old, and derives from a tool named "jam", which is even older (around for maybe 20 years). However, this name is probably no longer good.
Please, leave it as it is. As others have noted, the change will add problems to maintainers of various scripts, which I'm sure we all are more or less. I'm not convinced that the change of the name we all got used to to whatever other name will reduce the confusion. There is quite an amount of information online, including articles, blogs, forum and ML posts, about the tool being referred to as bjam. All this information is easily searchable with Google (e.g. typing "bjam" brings references to bjam and Boost.Build at the top of the page). In fact, from my perspective, the name is tightly associated with Boost.Build already, and there is no need to come up with another alternative. Besides, as far as I understand, the jamfiles syntax is based on the Jam language, so the name bjam does have its merit, unless you also want to switch to another language with the rename (in which case I would vote for dropping it altogether in favor of a more widespread build system, such as CMake). If the naming issue does arise often with users, I would suggest correcting the docs. Perhaps, Boost.Build and Boost.Jam docs (and, I suppose, libraries as such) should be just merged.