Hi Boosters, I am using boost in several projects now, and some of these projects will be released as open source. So they will have a configure script that checks the compiling host, and which should report missing libraries. I saw many open source projects adding boost to their source code tree directly, thus these projects dont have to check the proper boost versions, or library names. That solve the problem, but thats not a fine solution. To simplify using boost libraries i would like to see boost supporting pkg-config or a different maybe better approach which fits better to boost's needs. But first I would like to explain how pkg-config works, and how pkg-config makes using librariers simple. The pkg-config package can be found here: http://pgk-config.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fpkgconfig It seems to work on all unix systems and windows. The pkg-config script parses .pc files from several locations in the system, and allows querrying the existance, version, compiler flags and linker flags of installed libraries. For example the gtkmm-2.0.pc file looks like that on suse systems: prefix=/opt/gnome exec_prefix=${prefix} libdir=/opt/gnome/lib includedir=${prefix}/include Name: GTKmm Description: C++ wrapper for GTK+ Requires: glibmm-2.0 gdkmm-2.0 pangomm-1.0 atkmm-1.0 gtk+-2.0 Version: 2.2.8 Libs: -L${libdir} -lgtkmm-2.0 Cflags: -I${includedir}/gtkmm-2.0 -I${libdir}/gtkmm-2.0/include Thus when running 'pkg-config --libs gtkmm-2.0' One gets the output: -Wl,--export-dynamic -L/opt/gnome/lib -lgtkmm-2.0 -lgdkmm-2.0 -latkmm-1.0 -lgtk-x11-2.0 -lpangomm-1.0 -lglibmm-2.0 -lsigc-1.2 -lgdk-x11-2.0 -latk-1.0 -lgdk_pixbuf-2.0 -lm -lpangoxft-1.0 -lpangox-1.0 -lpango-1.0 -lgobject-2.0 -lgmodule-2.0 -ldl -lglib-2.0 which can be used to link a gtkmm application to all libraries needed. With the help of pkg-config can write simple makefiles, or build scripts which execute pkg-config directly. But pkg-config also comes with a nice m4 script to invoke it properly with autoconf. PKG_CHECK_MODULES(GTKMM, gtkmm-2.0, ,[AC_MSG_ERROR("Gtkmm-2.0 missing")]) I am not sure how to provide transparent support for different toolsets, and there is no way to specify further flags, like mt debug ... So qt for example has adds two files qt.pc and qt-mt.pc. So maybe pkg-config is not the right tool for boost. But at least for a large amount of the gcc-boost users it would be fine. Maybe boost could provide a similar facility for autotools. So maybe a small "boost-config" that gets flags like toolset, debug-switch, a version range descriptor, and then prints the compiler and/or linker flags. And a small m4/shell script that makes invoking that tool even simpler. Regards Andreas Pokorny