David Abrahams wrote:
Both in V1 and V2, Boost.Build user can specify any name/version for a compiler, and there's no way to prevent that. In addition, I can always make replace "cl.exe" with my own program which will invoke gcc.exe ;-) The point is: build system cannot be expected to determine toolset version automatically. I think it's reasonable to ask a person building boost to provide explicit version numbers when initializing a toolset, no? (While msvc.jam has some logic to autodetect installed version from target path, this cannot be considered 100% reliable).
Some systems invoke the tools with -v to see what they tell you about the version. It would be good to have that capability, but of course first we need someone to code up the portable popen.
Maybe, the right way is to write "configure.py" which will create user-config.jam appropriate to the current system? - Volodya