Peter Dimov wrote:
Edward Diener wrote:
You believe that every end user who wants to use a particular Boost library should run a test script just to determine whether or not that library is supported by Boost for the compiler/version which that person uses ?
Every end user who is not sure whether his configuration is supported by a particular library can run the tests. This is generally done by invoking 'bjam' (or 'bjam --toolset=foo' if the default doesn't work)
This now gets into understanding how bjam works. Argh !!! How does one find out the name of the toolset which corresponds to the compiler/version which one wants to test ? I am assuming that one must look at Boost Build documentation to determine this. However, let us say for VC++, the name msvc only specifies a compiler but not a version. Now one has to investigate how one specifies both a compiler and a version on the bjam command line. Good luck in finding this out for any end-user who does not have the patience of Job.
in the directory containing the tests, for example libs/smart_ptr/test. One can also use 'bjam shared_ptr_test' to single out a particular test. The resulting output could've been friendlier, and the whole procedure better documented, of course.
In a perfect world typing 'bjam' (or possibly 'bjam show' or something similar) in a test dir would cause an HTML page with the results to be launched in the default browser. :-)
What I am arguing for is that the end user, given a compiler and a version of that compiler, should have an easy path to determine whether a library supports that compiler/version. I wish I could believe that bjam is easy, but I do not. In particular, telling what compiler/version on the bjam command line seems like a complicated thing to me.