Re: [boost] [iostreams] building zlib from source

Subject: Re: [boost] [iostreams] building zlib from source
From: Vladimir Prus (vladimir_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-11-09 05:29:19

Alexander Arhipenko wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 11:52 AM, Vladimir Prus
> <vladimir_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>>
>> I am working on improving detection of external dependencies (for 1.42),
>> and I've noticed that the iostreams library is rather smart when it comes
>> to building zlib (and bz2). It allows the user to specify either:
>>
>> - location of headers and libraries files, or
>> - location of sources for zlib
>>
>> In the latter case, the sources will be compiled automatically.
>>
>> How important is the second use case? It's not very hard to support,
>> and appears handy for Windows users, but if in practice, nobody cares,
>> I can spend the time on other matters.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Volodya
>>
> 
> Hi, Volodya.
> We use the second case in our company when linking to iostreams on
> windows platforms.
> For this environment variable ZLIB_SOURCE should be exported
> (pointing to the actual location of zlib sources) or additional flag
> should be passed on command line to bjam:
> -sZLIB_SOURCE=X:/Y/zlib-1.2.3.
> It would be nice to have configuration line in site-config.jam or
> user-config.jam, e.g.:
> path-constant ZLIB_SOURCE = X:/Y/zlib-1.2.3 ;
> But this seems not to work.

If I end up implementing this, the interface will be:

1. If you specify -sZLIB_SOURCE when building boost for the first time,
the value will be stored in file named 'cached-config.jam' in the root,
and you will not be required to specify this again.
2. Specifying 'path-constant' like above will work in either site-config.jam,
or user-config.jam or project-config.jam.

Does this sound good?

- Volodya