On Tue, Jul 18, 2017 at 3:24 PM, Chris Glover via Boost < boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:
[snip]
internal package manager before I can upgrade boost. Currently, all I need
to do it write a script called from our custom build system that does something like;
- call bootstrap - call b2 with appropriate flags (this is the hard part) - add the include path - synthesize the link libraries
What's nice about this is that there are no dependencies -- everything is completely self contained, and I like that.
There is no reason why Boost+CMake can't do that too. In order for it to be as self-contained as it is now, it would require embedding the source code for CMake and any of its dependencies (I'm not sure whether there any to speak of) into the Boost distribution. I agree with Chris in that a big advantage of the current setup is that it is not dependent on CMake being installed on the user's system already. Even in today's almost-always-connected-to-a-package-manager world,
On 07/18/2017 04:33 PM, Zach Laine via Boost wrote: there are setups where it is cumbersome to say the least to install additional packages (especially binaries) when they are needed. I'm not a fan of Boost.Build either (I've used it almost exclusively in the workflow described above), but it seems like this effort is "discard one poorly documented, difficult to author/read build tool used by relatively few people, adopt a poorly documented, difficult to author/read build tool used by a lot more people". It's a shame that there really isn't a better tool that is easy to read, write, extend, and use across multiple platforms. At the risk of running into the situation described in https://xkcd.com/927/, I hope something better than CMake emerges someday. Jason