Alexander Arhipenko wrote:

On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 11:52 AM, Vladimir Prus <vladimir@codesourcery.com> wrote:

...

I am working on improving detection of external dependencies (for 1.42), and I've noticed that the iostreams library is rather smart when it comes to building zlib (and bz2). It allows the user to specify either:

- location of headers and libraries files, or - location of sources for zlib

In the latter case, the sources will be compiled automatically.

How important is the second use case? It's not very hard to support, and appears handy for Windows users, but if in practice, nobody cares, I can spend the time on other matters.

Thanks, Volodya

Hi, Volodya. We use the second case in our company when linking to iostreams on windows platforms. For this environment variable ZLIB_SOURCE should be exported (pointing to the actual location of zlib sources) or additional flag should be passed on command line to bjam: -sZLIB_SOURCE=X:/Y/zlib-1.2.3. It would be nice to have configuration line in site-config.jam or user-config.jam, e.g.: path-constant ZLIB_SOURCE = X:/Y/zlib-1.2.3 ; But this seems not to work.

If I end up implementing this, the interface will be: 1. If you specify -sZLIB_SOURCE when building boost for the first time, the value will be stored in file named 'cached-config.jam' in the root, and you will not be required to specify this again. 2. Specifying 'path-constant' like above will work in either site-config.jam, or user-config.jam or project-config.jam. Does this sound good? - Volodya