On Tue, May 6, 2025 at 5:05 PM René Ferdinand Rivera Morell <grafikrobot@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, May 6, 2025 at 2:52 AM Artyom Beilis via Boost <boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:
. I am proposing to replace b2.
While I can agree that b2 isn't particularly good build system by any stretch of imagination
Specific build systems, and all software, has advantages and disadvantages. We would benefit from feedback as to improvements we can make to our tools.
See, I discussed it a lot back in 2011 on this list. As bottom line when I worked on Boost.Locale having large experience with both, autotools cmake and even basic makefiles I totally failed to perform all tasks I needed I don't recall exactly but basic stuff like finding 3rd party libraries or conditional builds was total nightmare and very hard to maintain. Compare for example cmake: https://github.com/boostorg/locale/blob/develop/CMakeLists.txt and jamfile https://github.com/boostorg/locale/blob/develop/build/Jamfile.v2 that is twice as large and some tests that are built in in cmake (like test header/library) are generated in separate build The concept of "conditional flags" per build makes anything beyond simple tasks very challenging I couldn't complete the build system on my own and Vladimir Prus had come to my rescue... Even after that I failed to create conditional tests (so I just put ifdef to make them do nothing) but I think Alexander Grund that took the maintenance from me and does absolutely amazing job had fixed it, Bottom line, in my opinion bjam is a very limited build system. Maybe it servers Boost ok, but I would never choose one outside the scope mostly due its design of doing everything in the same flow under all conditions rather than the much simpler and easy to use CMake approach. I don't tell cmake is perfect - ohhh boy it isn't but I find it much more manageable, easy to use and well documented. Maybe stuff had changed since 2011 but for me it was very unpleasant experience, and I worked with autotools that were surprisingly simpler to use (at least for me) So take my words with a grain of salt :-) Artyom