I, like many others, have used b2 mainly to build boost libraries. I, like many others, have looked at it over the years and not quite adopted it for local projects. Once again, I am in the market for a build system (25,000 files and cross-compiling) and am trying to determine whether to use b2 or try out SCons or something similar. My primary concern remains that I

don't want developers spending time on the build system; that is, I want minimal information in far-down Jamfiles and I want magic to make all work. Secondarily, it would be nice if it were easy to create the magic (write rules, add features, and get done the special little things that always seem absolutely necessary). B2 has always seemed very good at the former and not so good at the latter.

So my question is, what are all the python scripts that have been paralleling the jam files for a few years? Is this some sort of effort to make rules and modifications easier to make? Is this an ongoing project? Is b2 itself and ongoing project? How easy is it to get answers to questions like:

I can define a local or third-party lib in such a way that the far-down Jamfiles only need to say /third/some_other_lib in a source list and b2 will correctly find the right one amongst the ten or so options depending on toolset, target-os, variant, and so on. However, if I try to use that name in a project requirements or use-requirements declaration (with <library>, it never seems to find it.

Actually, just for the fun of it, I would actually like an answer to that question in addition to the question about the question.

Thanks for your time.