David Abrahams wrote:
* If we drop the ability to arbitrarily choose a version string, we need a way to identify different configurations of a toolset that may have the same version number. For example:
- You may have both Cygwin and MinGW gcc 3.4 installed
- You may want to experiment with a special gcc build having C++0x features
- You may need a convenient way to identify a special configuration of an existing toolset.
The solution we came up with is to add an optional argument to "using" that allows you to create a special toolset subfeature on-the-fly, something like:
using gcc : 3.4 : /usr/local/conceptgcc/bin/g++ : conceptgcc ;
This feature could then also be used to identify the toolset on the command-line, something like:
bjam toolset=conceptgcc
I'm actually not sure if using "toolset=XXX" like this to alias to some other set of properties is good idea -- we might end up with lots of corner cases. I'd much rather have some "user-defined" subfeature, and then use: gcc-3.4-conceptgcc, or maybe gcc-3.4 flavour=conceptgcc or maybe gcc-3.4 <some-better-feature-name>=conceptgcc But otherwise I agree with that Dave said. - Volodya