Re: [boost] NuGet packages for boost

Subject: Re: [boost] NuGet packages for boost
From: Niall Douglas (s_sourceforge_at_[hidden])
Date: 2013-09-17 17:22:11

On 17 Sep 2013 at 16:10, Ben Craig wrote:

> > It seems to me that if you could convert bootstrap.bat to MSBuild, 
> > then packaging up Boost as NuGet ought to be fairly straightforward.
> 
> It depends on how you want to present things to users.  I think that you 
> are suggesting having consuming NuGet clients rebuild boost on their 
> machine.  That might work, but that seems like it would require porting a 
> lot of the existing bjam code.

Not really. If you can get NuGet to spit out a b2.exe, the rest of 
the build is very easy.

My issue with supplying prebuilt binaries via NuGet is that there are 
a lot of combinations, and a lot of variants because of MSVCRT and 
STL incompatibilities - for example, VS Express doesn't support some 
technologies such as OpenMP, so OpenMP using Boost libraries may have 
an issue. Prebuilt binaries means needing server bandwidth to deliver 
binaries and a meaty suite of CI build VMs with various Visual 
Studios, and bear in mind > VS2010 needs Windows 7, so there's a 
licence fee in there too.

If someone of course wants to set all that up and pay for it, I have 
no objection. Prebuilt binaries are easy on the end user.

Niall

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