On Sun, Nov 9, 2008 at 11:46, Phil Endecott <spam_from_boost_dev@chezphil.org> wrote:
I've written some open-source stuff that uses Boost and the inconsistency of library naming between distributions and between different versions has been a real pain for me, and for my users.
My main feeling is that I don't care what the libraries are called, as long as the naming is consistent.
This seems like the important point, to me. What if there were a way to specify what you want, and for some program to find whatever matches best?
At present, I'm shipping a Makefile that looks for libboost_thread-mt. This seems to keep most but not all people happy. I have the impression that the majority of distributions are shipping libraries with -mt suffixes but without the -gcc stuff, while a few are also stripping the -mt. I encourage you to converge towards the current majority position.
Suppose there were a boost_link program so that instead, you said something like: `boost_link =static =mt +gcc -stlport thread` And it gave you back the the static, mt version of the lib, preferring gcc and without stlport? (The script would find the shortest filename that satisfies all the conditions.)