building shared boost libraries

From: Steve M. Robbins (steven.robbins_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-01-13 16:09:31

Hello,

On Fri, Jan 11, 2002 at 12:15:04PM -0500, David Abrahams wrote:

> [...] one of the biggest reasons to use Jam is that we can avoid
> making the build/test system a pile of scripts written in a dozen different
> languages that no one person has the expertise to understand. Too many GNU
> tools are like this; it makes them impenetrable and hard-to-use.

I can understand why folks have this view.  The GNU auto-* tools, in
particular, have accreted a lot of layers of complexity over the
years.

I hope you appreciate, therefore, that someone steeped in the unix
world, having years of experience using auto-* tools, can find JAM
just as impenetrable on the first go.

I'm using linux (Debian) and the 1.26.0 release of BOOST.

I have been able to get jam built and running, and it builds several
flavours of static libraries for the regex, thread, and python
libraries.  For regex, I also end up with a shared library, but there
is no shared lib for the other two.

There is a Jamfile in libs/graph/build, but the graph project is not
a subinclude of the top-level Jamfile.  Intentional or oversight?

The lack of shared lib for the thread and python parts of boost is a
question of someone getting around to writing the jam rules?  Or is it
that they ought not to have one?

The shared library file for regex lacks a SONAME.  I poked around in
the jam stuff to fix this.  It appears that jam (or boost?) shares the
same "Link-action" rule for both programs and shared libraries.  Surely
there ought to be different rules for building a program versus building
a shared object?

Is there any BOOST policy on library versioning and SONAMES?  I'm
building packages for Debian.  The last packages that were built for
Debian were based on BOOST 1.21, and they did appear to use SONAMES.
However, all that mechanism (e.g. the makefiles) appears to have been
purged in the move to JAM.  True?  Should I forget about packaging
shared libs, and ship only the .a files?

Thanks for any tips or pointers,
-Steve

-- 
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by throwing back the blanket and laying down the legs ...
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