Robert Ramey wrote:
Why would anyone want to use this? and for what?
It's a Linux thing. On Linux, you do apt-get install boost and you get a pre-built Boost release (1.55.0, for example, for the current Debian/Ubuntu distributions) automatically downloaded and installed into the system header and library locations. So if you then want to upgrade just Boost.Python, you could in theory download a standalone Boost.Python release and build it with the system-installed Boost.Build, against the system-installed dependencies such as Boost.SmartPtr. On Windows (and, I suppose, OS X), there's no such system-supplied Boost, so the above doesn't apply and Windows people don't see a point, in a similar manner to how Linux people can't see the point of bpm.