Re: [boost] [ot] choosing a build system

Subject: Re: [boost] [ot] choosing a build system
From: Tim Blechmann (tim_at_[hidden])
Date: 2012-05-10 05:04:42

> I like very much Boost.Build, and I was quite disappointed to hear
> that there's a plan to move Boost to CMake. Boost is the main user of
> Boost.Build and I'm a little bit afraid of seeing it disappear, or
> being less and less unsupported. Even if I perfectly understand the
> reason of this change: Boost.Build suffers from lack of documentation
> and lack of popularity, whereas CMake is very well documented and
> widely used, it leaves me a bitter taste in mouth.

cmake has one huge advantage over scons or boost.build: it is not a
build system itself, but it populates a build system ... it therefore
scales quite well (in the contrast to scons).

it also has the nice side effect that it it integrates very well into
IDEs ... when using kdevelop or qtcreator, you can simply open the root
CMakeLists.txt file and it will populate a project for you. this is the
reason, why i ended up using a small cmake build system for my
boost-related development instead of using boost.build.

tim