Re: [boost] Proposal for moving Boost to CMake

For whatever its worth as a user who sometimes contributes patches to fix bugs, I don't use the system compiler and instead use scripts to test different builds of internal code (clang, clang with various sanitizers and options, different versions of gcc, etc). This is such a pain with boost build because of the difficulty of automating building multiple copies with custom compilers and flags with the same source tree. In cmake this is easy, you just change some command line flags, something trivial in scripts. In Boost, I think I got it working once using undocumented features after spending several hours looking around at docs, source code(!), and stack overflow. I now automatically just don't use boost libraries that aren't header only. I would rather rewrite code than fight with the build process. That is a bad state of affairs. On Sun, Jun 18, 2017 at 5:15 PM, Richard Hodges via Boost wrote:

"Easier integration with cmake" is. It the only concern. There's also cross-compiling to iOS, android etc etc.

How to do this properly is fully documented in cmake (And provided free of efort with polly) in bjam it's a total black art.

I am always left with the nagging feeling that something is wrong, because despite following the instructions on stack overflow, there is no actual documentation to convince me that all the voodoo in the jam files has received the correct number of sacrificial virgins.

This is a sorry state of affairs for the worlds most popular c++ library. It should be easy, no, automatic to include boost. After all, c++ without boost is like [insert idiom about useless things here].

R

On Mon, 19 Jun 2017 at 01:05, Rene Rivera via Boost wrote:

...

On Sun, Jun 18, 2017 at 4:09 PM, P F via Boost wrote:

...

However, when I upgrade boost, I need to upgrade cmake as well. There really shouldn’t be a coupling between cmake and boost, like that.

Instead

...

each library can provide the cmake configuration, and we can update cmake’s FindBoost module to look for these configuration files, or the user can just call them directly with `find_package(boost_asio)`.

First.. Needing to upgrade cmake to deal with newer releases of Boost is, IMO, a design and implementation defect of cmake.

Second.. Why not use something like Conan that doesn't care about what build system your dependencies use and will adjust to the build system you are using for your product?

-- -- Rene Rivera -- Grafik - Don't Assume Anything -- Robot Dreams - http://robot-dreams.net -- rrivera/acm.org (msn) - grafikrobot/aim,yahoo,skype,efnet,gmail

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