Re: Build

From: David Abrahams (abrahams_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-06-05 10:18:04

Aleksey,

I hope you don't mind that I'm forwarding this to the boost list also...

----- Original Message -----
From: "Aleksey Gurtovoy" <agurtovoy_at_[hidden]>

> David Abrahams wrote:
> > I hope you're not too involved in the very interesting
> > discussion about MPL to look at the build system stuff.
> > I'm counting on your input ;-)
>
> Hi Dave!
>
> Sorry for a late answer, I haven't managed to take a look at any of the
> boost issues I am interested in yesterday. So today came to work early,
and,
> after experimenting with things for a while, thought that I should write
you
> about my first experience with the boost build system and what are my
> further plans for it. Basically, it took me ~30 minutes to download and
> bootstrap Jam and to build a 'foo' example in the 'boost/build' directory.
> That's about the time I expected this to take, but still I am impressed
how
> easy it was :). Being informed about the problems Bill had yesterday
> definitely helped, though. The only issue I had to solve myself was, for
> some reason non-obvious for me :), necessity to explicitly specify a value
> of 'msvc.root-directory' variable used in the 'msvc-tools.jam' toolset
> description file. I wonder if I did something wrong and if it's
> possible/reasonable to set this variable/its derivatives using standard
> MSVC's environment variables such as MSVCDIR.

You did nothing wrong. I have been experimenting with different ways of
finding the tools. If it's reasonable to say that the compilation tools
should be in your path, then it's plausible to remove the explicit path
qualifications in xxx-tools.jam. In fact, that's what I did for the
metrowerks versions. It might be a good idea to allow users to set up some
variables to help us find the tools in the Jamrules file (which lives at the
project root) or alternatively in a user-rules.jam file. There are many
options; it's not easy to decide.

> Besides that, I didn't even
> need to think much before I got the expected result :).

That's a relief ;-)

> Of course, that was
> supposed to be simple. Much more interesting experiment will be building
> something that more closely resembles a real-life project. For instance, a
> real-life project :). That's what I am planning to do next. We have our
own
> (perl-based) build system at work, and will be interesting to see one of
our
> not-so-big projects ported to the boost build system. I'll report the
> results as soon as I'll get there.

Okay. Please remember, there's no DLL support yet as I'm still trying to
figure out how to address it. And when you find there's something you don't
know how to do, please ask.

> Well, I guess that's all for now. Just wanted to say that even although I
> used the build system for something less than an hour, I am really excited
> about the possibilities it promises to deliver, and I think it has a great
> potential.

Great news!