[boost] Why bjam is so great, or, [re] boost building with cmake

From: Dirk Griffioen (dirk_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-05-15 02:29:15

Hi all,

I just read (a bit of) the discussion on cmake - to me it's ominous 
boost is even considering this.

For me there were 2 reasons to start using boost in 2001, the libs *and* 
the build system. NO more vc projects file, make files, generated 
makefiles etc. But an elegant tool with a simple syntax building all my 
plaforms. (And please know, at some point we wrote our own makefile 
generator, but I can admit, bjam is just a better tool).

After that I started using bjam (bbv2) as my main buildtool and been 
happy with it ever since:

* I used it for over 4 years in all my work/commercial/consulting and 
private projects
* 'it just works'
* it forces you to structure your code well, think 'mountpoint = project'
* target definition is simple and elegant
* it nicely intergrates in a buildsystem like cerberus 
(http://cerberus.rubyforge.org), on all platforms I use(d) 
(sun,hp,aix,as400,osx,windows,linux ...

Some thing that worry me in the discussion:

We expend a lot of effort maintaining Boost.Build, much of which  
could be avoided if we bought into an existing system rather than  
rolling our own.

This is marketing speak! (And has nothing to do with how things work in 
reality).

And secondly, I believe tools like VC are not in the best interest of 
developers, so remarks like

CMake is about integrating well with the way the user develops code.  
That might be makefiles, VC++ projects, XCode projects, whatever.
Having used CMake, bjam, and autotools, I've found CMake to be by far  
the easiest system for *users* to get up and running with.

may sound reasonable, they are in fact a corruption - I apologize if 
this sounds offending, but I have never seen anything good coming from 
have to wade through a sea of 
projectfiles,makefiles,makefile-alike-syntax,the code itself *and* a 
directory structure below it all: too many universes to juggle around. 
It's complex enough even if you have a 1-on-1 mapping between 
buildsystem, code and directory layout; so in my view there's nothing 
wrong with imposing structure on users, they might even benefit from it 
(I know Id did ...).

To me it's feel backwards to try and get some 'old school' stuff like 
cmake into boost. Sure, bjam documentation isnt' all great and if 
there's only one guy doing the work, maybe that's the key to a solution 
then: write some docs, and get Mr Prus some help ...

And I may offend people here, but everyone I ever heard or saw 
complaining about bjam's difficulty (on windows or ...), well, they're 
just lazy. It's not that hard to build and I think some of the remarks 
by Mr Caisse, Mr Rivera, Mr Rozental and others demonstrate this.

Well, there you have it -

Regards, Dirk