I've been following the threads about building with boost and user experiences very carefully for the past couple months at least. Correct me if I am wrong... but the situation boils down to two items: o User Experience - first time users reaction out-of-the-tgz/zip o Library Author Experience - The ability for Boost library developers/testers to do what they need User Experience - I have read many people respond with the whole autoconfig familiarity for *nix developers. I would agree 100% 10 years ago, but today I think we are all trained to open the tar-ball and look for the INSTALL file to see what needs to be typed. To that end... I don't really care what I have to type, as long as it is installed on my machine. bjam was not installed on my machine, but I found a binary easily enough and was happy. The end result as a user... I had a "library" that I could include/link against using whatever build tool I was using. I also develop for win32 and several other targets and unlike *nix, there is no singular *norm* such as 'configure' or 'make install'. As such, I'm always having to look for the README file (or whatever the group decided to call it). As a win32 developer I was nearly ecstatic to find that I didn't have to load a VC project nor did I have to try getting the nmake file to work on my machine. I typed the bjam command as given in the documentation and it just worked... I was surprisingly shocked. All this to say... I don't care as a user how it builds as long as it is easy to do. Library Author Experience - All I can comment here is that I don't see a lot of complaints that bjam and Boost.Build don't do what people need. I see complaints that people have to learn another build tool or that the current tool is under-documented. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but my own experience for both library and application development (including writing custom generators) has been that the Boost.Build system is more than capable. I am sure this didn't come overnight and that there has been enormous thought and iteration to create such a system. So now that there is one... what is the effort to maintain it? As far as CMake... I suspect the above two considerations ultimately need to be measured. I clearly have no vote in this matter; however, it appears such a great effort has gone into creating a tool that works for the needs of the Boost community. I would hate to see great effort in switching if the source of the complaints are from a user group that would also have trouble getting Apache's Xerces-C going. Best Regards - -- ---------------------------------- Michael Caisse Object Modeling Designs www.objectmodelingdesigns.com