Jason Earl <Jason@hybd.net> wrote:
You've probably come out with a worst case scenario
Have I? So what did I do wrong to get me into this? I just downloaded the stuff and followed the guide. It seems easy to hit the worst case.
with regards to that attempt to compile things, and I do remember a few things being a pain initially when compiling for the first time. However, it didn't take long for me to make intelligent guesses on what to do to get things working, and it was only minutes before I managed to get things working smoothly when I last tried. This is certainly a lot less painless than a some of the builds I've done on Linux for web stuff.
I think a lot of Windows users are too used to things just working out of the box, and give up if things don't work like that.
If wanted, I'd most likely find out, too. The original argument was that it takes too much effort to do this. I second that. There's too many out there who simply won't spend that effort (and who don't share your resentiments against anything but shell typing). I repeat: Do you want widespread use of boost or do you want widespread use of boost among programmers who know their way around with a shell?
As for understanding what targets are etc, I think most developers will know what targets are. [...]
With thinking a few seconds I came up with three overloaded meanings we use the term for here. I still don't know what exactly targets are in the boost build system. And frankly, don't think I should need to read its documentation in order to know. There's a lot I have to fit into one day, it's already tight without reading it.
Despite all the errors people might get with installing, Boost does have this excellent mailing list where people can quickly get the help they need.
Do you want all users come to the mailing list and ask? (Then why have a build system at all?)
Maybe it would be good to have some control over build verbosity (there probably already is some, I just haven't looked yet), Maybe logging the build info to a file would be better and then logging errors, messages etc to the screen (and maybe a separate) log file.
Yes, I thought of this myself. But the heck -- there's so many libs out there I will never have the time to look at. If I wouldn't know boost is more than just another one of those, I would just forget about it keep hacking.
You really can't complain at long error messages.
Why not? (Where would we be hadn't we complained all the time? <g> )
After all C++ programmers should be used to them, they happen all of the time with template based code.
True. My compiler smoetimes spits out 3-4k error messages for templates, too. But it gives me the convenience of easily navigating among them. (And I still complain to my vendor that I want this even easier!)
Jason
On 25 May 2005, at 14:46, Hendrik Schober wrote: [...]
Schobi -- SpamTrap@gmx.de is never read I'm Schobi at suespammers dot org "Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving" Terry Pratchett