Re: [boost] Stop on first error

Subject: Re: [boost] Stop on first error
From: Johan Nilsson (r.johan.nilsson_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-03-16 05:03:07

Vladimir Prus wrote:
> Presently, when building Boost, the build process does not stop if an
> error has occurred. This is behaviour we inherited, and it differs
> from every
> other build system out there. We had quite a number of users confused
> where build ends with "failed N targets", with the original error
> scrolled away -- it is not apparent what has caused the error, and
> often, the error is not even available from console program history.
>
> While experienced users might prefer being able to kick a build, go
> to lunch, and then fix a couple of failures in the middle of the
> build, ordinary users don't like it so much. So, how about we do what
> the rest of the world does, and stop build of C++ Boost on the first
> error?

I personally use bjam's "-q" switch for at least 90% of my bjam invocations 
when I work interactively with the code. The other 10% or so occurs e.g. 
when I perform a parallell full/clean build of some of our projects that 
include some volatile functional testing (timing-sensitive tests that are 
affected by having the system heavily loaded), in order to "build as much as 
possible as fast as possible". For the latter I usually invoke the build 
using e.g. "bjam -a -jN && bjam -q".

For the builds on our continuous integration servers we never use the "-q" 
switch, obviously.

In summary; having the equivalent of "-q" as the default would be preferred, 
but I don't have a very strong opinion about this.

> Comments?

Perhaps just using the "-q" switch in all examples in the "Getting Started" 
guide, and strongly recommend "non-advanced" users to always do that, could 
help out here?

/ Johan