Re: [boost] Status of Visual Studio 2017 support

Subject: Re: [boost] Status of Visual Studio 2017 support
From: Andrew Pardoe (Andrew.Pardoe_at_[hidden])
Date: 2017-02-15 16:34:40

[Tom] Yes! We need a way to do it without compiling any code.  See the discussion in this (nasty) pull request:

Thanks, Tom. I've made a (useless) comment on the PR so that I get notified of any action. And so that I get mail when anyone wants to complain.

My first post to this list took a while to get moderated. Here's the off-list conversation I had with Rene:

On Tue, Feb 14, 2017 at 9:39 PM, Andrew Pardoe <Andrew.Pardoe_at_[hidden]> wrote:
That said, I don't think this is public yet. I've never actually sent mail to Boost. My first mail is now awaiting moderation. But once I can mail the list I'll loop this back in.

Ah, didn't realize that :-)

I'm sorry the move to VS 2017 has been tough. We think that there are a lot of advantages to the new VS setup over the old one. We did make some bad decisions along the way-I won't argue that-but overall I think it's a net gain. But we do need to make your scenario work. 
 
I agree that it doesn't make sense to have to compile a utility to find the compiler. Most of the people we were targeting with this COM API are people who use the MSVC compiler during their installer. For example, node.js and Python both compile code during install on Windows. They can easily call the COM API.

I see.. For us there is no external installer. Boost Build, which is what the repo is for, is both the build system and the installer. 

I'm assuming your situation is that a person enlists in this repo and you'd like the build.bat to just build. They shouldn't have to download a precompiled utility. Everything should be on the disk. Is that correct?

That's correct. The only assumption on our part is that the user has a compiler of some sort installed. And we try and discover what that compiler is and use it to build a bootstrap program. That then takes over the rest of the build & install procedure. This is more commonly run as part of the general Boost getting started procedure. So the sequence is more akin to (1) download boost (2) run bootstrap which runs build.bat/sh (3) build+install Boost Libraries.

-- 
-- Rene Rivera
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