[boost] Newbie Question: best installation location/setup for linux?

From: Christo Fogelberg (cgf_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-05-26 05:57:45

Hi everybody,

I'm quite new to boost, and wondering how best to install it under linux
with GCC. I have no problem getting it to compile and run, but with all
the .a files hidden away in huge directory trees, and the include files
hidden several layers deep, I'm wondering what people have done to make
the whole lot more accessible - and easy to manage.

E.g. at the moment, I have to add horrendously long -L commands with GCC
to each library I want to link to, and if I want to avoid linking to the
libraries by using the 'inline' headers* I can't seem to move the
headers out of the boost installation tree, as they use relative paths
to cpp files in the lib directory.

At the moment I'm thinking of creating a /usr/local/boost director, or
some such, and creating symlinks to all the static library files in
/usr/local/lib - but doing all that is going to be a royal PITA! What
have other people that works better? How do you manage the complex
directory structure?

Thanks in advance for any help, and I apologise if this question is a
bit vague and fluffy - I guess I'm really looking for some practices
that will make it easy for me to refer to different libraries in Boost
in different projects I'm working on.

Cheers,
Christo

*I'm not sure if this is the correct terminology, maybe it's
'offline'? - apologies if I got it wrong :-)