John Maddock wrote:
Rene Rivera wrote:
John Maddock wrote:
If I do a:
bjam stage --toolset=msvc-8.0 --with-regex
Then with 1.35 I don't get any static libraries built, just the dll's. Was this a deliberate change somewhere? It's a problem because the default for auto-linking is to look for static rather than dynamic libraries.
Yes, it was intentional <http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel/168552>. We also discussed it at one point <http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel/166847>. I guess we should switch autolink to default to the dynamic libs?
That's actually not possible without changing folks library code: it's a per-library decision which is the default, with the static library being recomended as the default unless there are reasons to choose otherwise. There's a great deal of documentation that would have to change to reflect this as well.
There's also a rationale for why static linking is the default behaviour in our docs here: http://www.boost.org/more/separate_compilation.html#static_or_dynamic
There's a further issue with building only one variant under MSVC: it doesn't work!
By only building a release build, then the only thing that will work "straight out the box" is building a release build of your application against the dll runtime. Debug builds will generate linker errors (can't find the auto-linked library etc), as will builds against the static runtime, this means that Boost will appear totally broken if users try and build the default debug builds that their IDE gives them.
We need to be *very* careful with this, or the complaints will be loud and vociferous! If the aim is to reduce the number of variants built, then I would suggest:
Dymanic *and* static lib, as Release, multithreaded, dynamic runtime single build on Unix variants (2 build variants).
I'd be opposed to this. How many popular projects can you name, that build two variants on Linux? - Volodya