David Abrahams wrote:
nick@ilm.com (Nick Rasmussen) writes:
On Mon, 18 Apr 2005, Rene Rivera wrote:
Walter Landry wrote:
You are confusing me. The whole point of autoconf is to deal with a variety of compilers and systems.
Autoconf is about dealing with *one* compiler and *one* system. Boost developers often switch between compilers, and sometimes compile for multiple compilers at the same time. That is something that is cumbersome to do with autoconf.
Having always used autoconf for my projects, I don't really find having multiple build roots cumbersome, and use separate build roots for every package that I build, and every project that I work on:
How did "multiple build roots" come into this?
I think he was referring to doing multiple different directories where you do a "configure" with different settings of compiler, and other settings. Which is the way you work with more than one compiler and autoconf.
tar xjvf package-0.0.tar.bz2 mkdir build-PLATFORM cd build-PLATFORM ../package-0.0/configure <options> make make install
With bjam I found things a bit more difficult. Once I downloaded and built bjam, to build boost I first made a shell script:
#!/bin/sh -x bjam --prefix=/dept/rnd/importlibs/LINUX_IA32/suse9.2/boost-1.32.0-gcc400pre1 \ --builddir=build-SUSE_IA32-gcc400pre1 --with-python-root=/usr \ -sPYTHON_VERSION=2.3 -sGCC=/dept/rnd/vendor/gcc-4.0.0-20050410/bin/gcc \ -sGXX=/dept/rnd/vendor/gcc-4.0.0-20050410/bin/g++ --layout=system $*
I agree that's too hard.
But it's not any harder than the *real* autoconf equivalent of: tar xjvf package-0.0.tar.bz2 mkdir build-SUSE_IA32-gcc400pre1 cd build-SUSE_IA32-gcc400pre1 export PYTHON_VERSION=2.3 export PYTHON_ROOT=/usr ###-haven't seen a configure script you can change which ###-python should be used export GCC=/dept/rnd/vendor/gcc-4.0.0-20050410/bin/gcc export GXX=/dept/rnd/vendor/gcc-4.0.0-20050410/bin/g++ ../package-0.0/configure --prefix=/dept/rnd/importlibs/LINUX_IA32/suse9.2/boost-1.32.0-gcc400pre1 make make install And I dare people to point more than one configure script, or configure installation instructions that tell you that you can set GCC/CC etc. to use something other than the system compiler.
discovered that the -- options were only supported in the toplevel jamfile, and I ended up having to read through the jamfile to find out what the -- options mapped onto in terms of bjam settings,
That's because in BBv1 the -- options are a hack used to make things easy for people installing from the top layer. BBv2 should make this pain go away.
Well it will eventually.. I only recently convinced Volodya that having those top level options everywhere was a good idea. And, yes in BBv1 this is a hack :-)
* stopping at the first error bjam by default seems to do the equivalent of make -k
I think that's correct. I don't think there's an option for that one.
bjam -q Although I haven't tried it, so don't know if it works.
and I'm also sure that bjam has benefits over a make-based system that I don't see, but on the whole all I really care about as far as build systems go is unobtrusiveness. In that regard, autoconf based systems are the winner for me due to their familiarity, consistency and pervasiveness.
They work great on Unix for certain kinds of jobs. They don't work so well on Windows. They're better for users and worse for developers that don't know how to write autoconf internals. I think we can make Boost.Build easier to learn and use than autoconf is, but I have to admit that it's not a hands-down win yet.
Here's a test for you to see how close we are to being there.. With the latest Boost CVS state, make your user-config.jam have only this (which will eventually be done by default): import msvc-config ; import cw-config ; import pythong-config ; And cd to boost-root and do: bjam --v2 --with-thread install And that's it. Which only leaves the install of bjam itself, but we can work on that also. -- -- Grafik - Don't Assume Anything -- Redshift Software, Inc. - http://redshift-software.com -- rrivera/acm.org - grafik/redshift-software.com -- 102708583/icq - grafikrobot/aim - Grafik/jabber.org