[boost] Boost CVS not playing well with MSVC 8.0

From: Dean Michael Berris (mikhailberis_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-06-28 16:20:35

Hi Everyone,

I've recently just got the courage to get the CVS source from
sourceforge, and I had encountered numerous problems with
building/installing it, and then actually using it -- in Windows after
having working with boost for quite a while now in Linux.

As the post suggests, I'm using MS Visual C++ 8.0 (the free one, which
comes with the Express edition of the IDE) and here are two of the
problems encountered while building:

1) Python is already installed in the system (C:\Python24) but the
build system still complains about it -- tried defining PYTHON_ROOT to
no avail and "--with-python-root=[]" but the flag is not recognized
(and turns up an error using Boost.Jam v 2).

2) Tools not explicitly defined in documentation: I had to wade
through errors and complaints from Boost.Jam to find out that I needed
bison,flex,m4 among other stuff. I haven't seen any documentation
requiring these tools, and it would be very much appreciated if they
were conveniently expressed in documentation. (more a
request/observation than anything)

3) Defaults for msvc 8.0 like directory paths, etc. had to be manually
defined. Though this may be addressed with Boost.Build, I still don't
have enough experience with it to actually propose a fix/workaround.
The Platform SDK environment vars also had to be set, which which
distributed apart from the MSVC 8.0 Express toolchain -- which might
become a requirement in the future, but am too much of an MS noob to
start figuring this out for now.

When building, there are a lot of deprecated complaints, and even
template warnings. This might have something to do with the changes
from 7.1 to 8.0, though they are mostly warnings than anything else.

I had encountered installation and usage issues that might be specific
to MSVC 8.0, and I've summarized them below:

- libs build alright, and are copied to the specified location.
However, when a project built using the unit_testing_framework for
example is about to link to the .lib, MSVC 8.0 looks for a file named
"libboost_unit_test_framework-vc80-mt-gd-1_35.lib" but only
"boost_unit_test_framework-vc-gd-1_35.lib" is available.

- headers don't get copied fully when installed: I had to manually
copy over a lot of the preprocessor library and the mpl library into
the install directory.

Any tips and pointers (and other information that you think might be
helpful) will be most appreciated. I still have to figure out
Boost.Jam to be able to contribute to the installation and usage
problems outlined above, although I hope the above report helps.

NOTE: I only uncommented "using msvc ; " in user-config.jam -- please
let me know if there are other things that might be helpful to make
sense of the stuff posted above.

Have a great day everyone, and hope this helps!

-- 
Dean Michael C. Berris
C/C++ Software Architect
Orange and Bronze Software Labs
http://3w-agility.blogspot.com/
http://cplusplus-soup.blogspot.com/
Mobile: [phone]
Email: dean [at] orangeandbronze [dot] com