[boost] MPC support for Boost

From: Kevin Heifner (heifner_k_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-02-16 14:11:56

After seeing some posts about people having difficulties building
Boost with bjam and Dave Abrahams comment about wishing to add
Microsoft solution files as an alternative build option.  OCI
decided to add MPC (http://www.ociweb.com/products/mpc) support 
to Boost.  Chad Elliott the creator of MPC put together the zip 
file in Boost Vault under Miscellaneous which contains the 
necessary files to add MPC support to Boost.

Here is a little description of the addition.  It would be great 
if this could be added to Boost and something similar to this 
description added to the getting started web page.

Building Boost using bjam is straightforward and easy to use for
those used to building applications with make.  However, for 
those who have little or no exposure to make may find building 
Boost with bjam somewhat confusing or difficult.  The MPC 
application can be used to provide an alternate build mechanism 
for the Boost libraries.

MPC (http://www.ociweb.com/products/mpc) can generate makefiles
and projects for various build tools (make, Visual C++ 6.0, 
Visual Studio 7.1, etc.) Allowing users to choose their favorite 
build tool increases the appeal of Boost.

We have put together boost.mwc (a workspace), a set of mpc files
(projects) and a simple perl based configure script that allows 
MPC to generate a usable workspace (with projects) to build 
various libraries located in Boost.  This perl based configure 
script is used to set up various required environment variables 
and then runs MPC.  It takes a few options (most (coicide with 
the existing configure shell script), one of which is the
--with-toolset option that converts the Boost toolset into the
corresponding MPC options.

The result of building Boost with MPC will leave the user with a
set of libraries located in a "lib" directory at the top of the 
boost directory tree.  The libraries are named as they would be 
when built with bjam.  The current state of the .mwc file and 
perl based configure script only allows building multi-threaded 
versions of the Boost libraries.  This is not meant to replace 
bjam, just provide an alternate way of building Boost.

Thanks,
KevinH
-- 
Kevin Heifner  heifner @ ociweb.com  http://heifner.blogspot.com
           Object Computing, Inc. (OCI) www.ociweb.com