Re: [boost] New name of bjam.exe

Subject: Re: [boost] New name of bjam.exe
From: Andrey Semashev (andrey.semashev_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-07-21 14:23:20

On 07/20/2010 12:45 PM, Vladimir Prus wrote:
>
> I am sure that most of you got accustomed to typing "bjam" in console whenever you
> want to build things. This name is old, and derives from a tool named "jam", which
> is even older (around for maybe 20 years). However, this name is probably no longer
> good.

Please, leave it as it is. As others have noted, the change will add 
problems to maintainers of various scripts, which I'm sure we all are 
more or less.

I'm not convinced that the change of the name we all got used to to 
whatever other name will reduce the confusion. There is quite an amount 
of information online, including articles, blogs, forum and ML posts, 
about the tool being referred to as bjam. All this information is easily 
searchable with Google (e.g. typing "bjam" brings references to bjam and 
Boost.Build at the top of the page). In fact, from my perspective, the 
name is tightly associated with Boost.Build already, and there is no 
need to come up with another alternative.

Besides, as far as I understand, the jamfiles syntax is based on the Jam 
language, so the name bjam does have its merit, unless you also want to 
switch to another language with the rename (in which case I would vote 
for dropping it altogether in favor of a more widespread build system, 
such as CMake).

If the naming issue does arise often with users, I would suggest 
correcting the docs. Perhaps, Boost.Build and Boost.Jam docs (and, I 
suppose, libraries as such) should be just merged.