[boost] Jam is not enough

From: John Maddock (John_Maddock_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-02-22 07:30:25

>This is nonsense.  Detecting endianness is one of the easiest things
>to do with a build-time check.  It turns out that GNU libc has an
><endian.h> header that I can use to get around this, so I patched 
>the file to use it.  But the boost headers are rife with things
>like

Lets get that into the config system - do you have the details for
endian.h?

>  #if (__BORLANDC__ == 0x550) || (__BORLANDC__ == 0x551)
>and
>  #if __GNUC__ < 3 || __GNUC__ == 3 && __GNUC_MINOR__ == 0 &&
__GNUC_PATCHLEVEL__ < 3
>
>This is nonsense.  Debian builds on a number of architectures each
>with its own version of GNUCC, and libc, and attendent bugs.  I don't
>believe that you are going to be able to track all these compiler bugs
>on all the various platforms.  At best, you're going to be reacting to
>bug reports.
>
>It's far better to detect the quirks automatically at build time on
>the build system.  That gives you a fighting chance to install it on a
>novel combination of OS/compiler/stdlib.

Accepted, but:

* sometimes it is not possible to devise a small test case for every
possible bug (particularly where it is a case of bad code generation, I
don't know if that is the case here though).
* If the bug is compiler specific a config macro is probably overkill - we
have enough of those anyway.
* If the bug is specific to a win32 compiler, then we won't be using
autoconf anyway will we?

Finally, just to remind everyone again, 

BOOST DOES HAVE A CONFIGURE SCRIPT.

- John Maddock
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/john_maddock/