I have been using Boost at work for quite a while, so I'm no stranger to Boost,
or this list, and need no convincing about Boost's general high quality and utility.
However, I've recently installed Boost on my home PC, and found the experience
surprisingly difficult, and to be honest found that the "Getting Started" instructions
are a wee bit poor.
I'm installing on Fedora 13, 32 bit, on fairly old hardware, with Gnu C++ 4.5.1, which
I've also just built from source for the first time, so maybe there's something I've
missed from that process which is having some impact on my Boost experience.
Here's a few observations...
* First time round I figured that the right place to unpack the zip archive was to the
place I ultimately wanted the include files to be (say /usr/local/include), because it's
only when you get to the build binaries stuff that the whole copy/build thing is mentioned.
Ok, so I should have read all the instructions first, but maybe this could be made
clearer earlier.
* Having come finally to step 5, the whole 'path/to/installation' thing appears, so I
backtracked and put my zip expansion somewhere else. I'm keen to set this up
so that I can support several boost versions, so am using the --prefix argument
to bootstrap. I think I also need to supply this argument to bjam, at least it seemed
to work that way.
* That seemd to work ok, although there were some failures for things like MPI
and zip, which are, I now realise, ok, but disconcerting. Maybe the instructions
could say a few words about the log output expected. I know this is mentioned in
the Custom Build stuff, but I'm following the easy idiot's guide. (Appropriate you
may think, and you may very well be right!)
* Then I came to link the example regex program... what is all that stuff about
library naming? I didn't seem to have libraries with names like that at all, my regex
libraries were libboost_regex.{a,so,so.1.45.0}, so I used that, and I still don't
know what all the stage stuff is about - it seemed to work without it, but maybe
there's something that's going to bite me.
* Finally my link was failing with "`GLIBCXX_3.4.14' not found", which Googling seemed
to suggest was because I need Fedora 14 libstdc++. So I installed that, and now
it seems to work.. so far!
Ok, so I got there, as I'm sure most people do, but it's not exactly a shrink-wrapped
install experience, and a good deal harder than installing on Windoze. I wonder how many
people are put off by this.
Hmmm... reading that back it sounds like a lot of minor whinging, which is a shame
'cos I think Boost is 'triffic.
Thx
- Rob.