+main boost list to see if anyone there has an answer... On Mon, Oct 22, 2007 at 04:59:49PM +0100, Graham Bennett wrote:

Hi all,

I'm coming across Boost.Build V2 for the first time while working on building Boost 1.34.1, upgrading from 1.33.1.

I currently build boost from a driver makefile that invokes bjam with the correct options for each platform. I do this to make my life easier since I have some easy ways to determine things like installation paths, include paths, compiler flags and preprocessor defines from within my driver makefile in a platform-independant way.

It seems as though in V2 there has been a move away from passing configuration options via the command line, and the way that command line arguments is parsed means that adding something like "include=/foo/bar" (which was my initial guess) will end up as three different properties since it's split on the slashes, leading to errors about include having no value.

While in general I do think specifying options in files rather than on the command line is to be encouraged in order to promote reproducible builds, I do think it's important to have a way of overriding things on a per-invocation basis. In my case I already have a way of achieving reproducible builds via my driver makefile system, so having a way of passing these options down to bjam at invocation is quite important.

So before I go any further I'd like to get confirmation that:

- there's no way to pass this kind of option to bjam from the command line anymore

- is there any way to pass this kind of information via the environment rather than the command line?

- the recommended way for me to configure boost from my driver makefile would be to generate a separate jam file that bjam would then include for each platform. Is this best done by generating site-config.jam?

cheers,

Graham

-- Graham Bennett

Graham -- Graham Bennett