Re: [boost] NuGet packages for boost

Subject: Re: [boost] NuGet packages for boost
From: Ben Craig (ben.craig_at_[hidden])
Date: 2013-09-17 21:31:36

Responding almost bottom up...

> If someone of course wants to set all that up and pay for it, I have 
> no objection. Prebuilt binaries are easy on the end user.
Garrett Serack has offered up hosted server VMs with Visual Studio 
preinstalled.  So for now, I'm going to pretend that the compilers and 
licenses won't be an issue.

> My issue with supplying prebuilt binaries via NuGet is that there are 
> a lot of combinations, and a lot of variants because of MSVCRT and 
> STL incompatibilities - for example, VS Express doesn't support some 
> technologies such as OpenMP, so OpenMP using Boost libraries may have 
> an issue.
I see this as a major challenge as well.  However, right now clients have 
to figure it out on their own.  It's even worse for libraries that want to 
use Boost, but require Boost to be built "correctly".  If some library 
needs Boost built with OpenMP support, I want that library to be able to 
express that dependency cleanly.

> > > It seems to me that if you could convert bootstrap.bat to MSBuild, 
> > > then packaging up Boost as NuGet ought to be fairly straightforward.
> > 
> > It depends on how you want to present things to users.  I think that 
you 
> > are suggesting having consuming NuGet clients rebuild boost on their 
> > machine.  That might work, but that seems like it would require 
porting a 
> > lot of the existing bjam code.
> 
> Not really. If you can get NuGet to spit out a b2.exe, the rest of 
> the build is very easy.
I'm going to rephrase this to check my own understanding.  I think that 
you are suggesting that the bootstrap / b2 build process should get ported 
to msbuild.  Then, when a user installs the Boost NuGet package, b2 will 
get built, and then the Boost libraries themselves will get built, all 
using the current compiler.

I think that could work.  I don't think NuGet makes it easy.  I think it 
also will cause long install times.  But it has the significant benefit of 
sidestepping download size issues, and pre-building all the configuration 
options.  I think this could also be packaged up in a way that clients 
that want boost-thread for the static CRT could just build the libraries 
they need, and no others.  So this idea has significant merits, but my 
current preference is still to have built binaries.