On Sat, Dec 9, 2017 at 1:37 PM, James E. King, III via Boost < boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:
The boost documentation on the web site talks about building boost from source, but I don't see information on how to leverage optional third party libraries easily accessible in the documentation from the place the user will most likely end up: "Building From Source". This information seems to be tucked away in documentation of various components, making it difficult to actually build a complete boost.
I think it would be a good idea to bring this information up to the top level build instructions, at the very least itemize these third party packages and then link to the relevant project-specific documentation pages that talk about configuring to use them.
Here are the third party optional libraries I know about so far and the libraries that use them:
bzip2 (iostreams) iconv (locale - if icu not available) icu (locale, regex) lzma (iostreams) openssl (asio, beast) pthread-win32 (sync, thread) zlib (beast, gil, iostreams)
Any others? Would folks find it useful if this information was part of the standard "Building From Source" sections of the upper layers of documentation?
Thanks,
Jim
MPI needs an underlying C MPI library to build, but you have options of various ones you can link against. That makes it a bit different than the other things listed above, and that's why I've never included it with any of the windows builds. The Fedora packaging logic includes variants for both of those (so you can install separate boost-mpich and boost-openmpi packages, see https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/boost). I think it would be great if we could define packaging metadata that make it easy to build individual boost packages along those lines, but in a platform-agnostic way. That would not only benefit all the boost
On 09.12.2017 16:49, Tom Kent via Boost wrote: maintainers for the various platforms, but also and in particular boost users, who would see a platform-independent set of Boost components, much like what Rene did for conan. Stefan -- ...ich hab' noch einen Koffer in Berlin...