Re: [boost] Re: Why Jam?

From: John Maddock (John_Maddock_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-02-27 07:27:08

>Let's see ... The biggest one is regex. At the moment I'm using a C++
>wrapper around the Posix <regex.h> facilities (my code doesn't need to
>be portable to non-Posix systems), which does what I want but (being C)
>is very unsatisfactory from the internationalisation point of view. I'm
>currently thinking that my best approach would be to extract the regex
>library from boost, remove the boost dependencies, and distribute it
>myself, since it already has a pretty good confifgure/install system of
>its own.

BTW regex is available separately from boost from my homepages if you just
want that, and not the whole boost package.

>Because there's no way for end users to install them.

In all probability end users should not install boost - there are several
things (threading support being one) - which may result in binary
incompatibilities in object/library files depending how they are built.

By far the best way to manage boost is to distribute it as "part of" your
application, and static link to all boost libs, otherwise you will be in
for some unintended consequences if someone replaces your build of
libboost_regex.so with something that's not compatible 'cos it was built
with different compiler options, or is a binary incompatible version (at
this stage it not clear to me at least what binary compatibility means for
C++ code, and what changes will break it - it is way more complex than C).

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