Re: [boost] Proposal for moving Boost to CMake

Subject: Re: [boost] Proposal for moving Boost to CMake
From: Andrey Semashev (andrey.semashev_at_[hidden])
Date: 2017-06-18 18:50:00

On 06/18/17 18:13, Peter Dimov via Boost wrote:
> "P F" wrote:
> 
>> git clone https://github.com/boostorg/hana
>> cd hana
>> b2 install
> 
> Does anybody actually do this? It feels completely alien to me. Where 
> would the headers go? What will happen to the already existing system 
> Boost installation? What if I want to uninstall?

FWIW, my experience with Boost, when I build it for a product, is to 
build packages for the system package manager (.deb, .rpm) and then
build the product against those packages. `b2 install` is invoked in the 
process of building Boost packages, but not the product.

When working on Boost or with toy projects, I never install and instead 
specify include and library dirs pointing to the Boost tree.

`make install` into system directories and similar commands are indeed 
discouraged (at least, on Linux) because there is typically no `make 
uninstall`. You can install into a separate subtree though, with the 
assumption that you can safely delete it afterwards.