[boost] Build+Install+/Zc:wchar_t in Visual studio builds

From: John Maddock (john_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-10-30 06:38:49

Guys,

Rene's new Install code is working very well for me now, but I have a
question about how we're building with Visual Studio .NET.

Currently the vc7 and vc7.1 toolsets turn on /Zc:wchar_t unconditionally
when building, however this is not the default option in current versions of
the IDE, and of course the two options produce binary-incompatible libraries
(at least as far as regex is concerned).

How should we handle this?

At the very least I would like to see a bjam option to turn off /Zc:wchar_t,
but how should we be building the libraries by default:  turning native
wchar_t support on is the standards conforming way, but not currently the
default Visual Studio way, or the way many third party libraries (like ICU
for example) are built.  Does anyone know how this option interacts with
MFC/ATL/VisualForms etc?

We could of course create a new build variant to handle this, but with 8
regex lib/dll variants already I'm not keen to add another 8 (apart from
anything else testing already takes too long).

I'm cross posting this to the Boost.users group as well, since whatever
resolution we take will affect them the most :-)

Thanks,

John.