Re: [boost] Proposal for moving Boost to CMake

Subject: Re: [boost] Proposal for moving Boost to CMake
From: Gary Furnish (gfurnish_at_[hidden])
Date: 2017-06-19 00:53:35

For whatever its worth as a user who sometimes contributes patches to
fix bugs, I don't use the system compiler and instead use scripts to
test different builds of internal code (clang, clang with various
sanitizers and options, different versions of gcc, etc).  This is such
a pain with boost build because of the difficulty of automating
building multiple copies with custom compilers and flags with the same
source tree.  In cmake this is easy, you just change some command line
flags, something trivial in scripts.  In Boost, I think I got it
working once using undocumented features after spending several hours
looking around at docs, source code(!), and stack overflow.  I now
automatically just don't use boost
libraries that aren't header only.  I would rather rewrite code than
fight with the build process. That is a bad state of affairs.

On Sun, Jun 18, 2017 at 5:15 PM, Richard Hodges via Boost
<boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> "Easier integration with cmake" is. It the only concern. There's also
> cross-compiling to iOS, android etc etc.
>
> How to do this properly is fully documented in cmake (And provided free of
> efort with polly) in bjam it's a total black art.
>
> I am always left with the nagging feeling that something is wrong, because
> despite following the instructions on stack overflow, there is no actual
> documentation to convince me that all the voodoo in the jam files has
> received the correct number of sacrificial virgins.
>
> This is a sorry state of affairs for the worlds most popular c++ library.
> It should be easy, no, automatic to include boost. After all, c++ without
> boost is like [insert idiom about useless things here].
>
> R
>
>
> On Mon, 19 Jun 2017 at 01:05, Rene Rivera via Boost <boost_at_[hidden]>
> wrote:
>
>> On Sun, Jun 18, 2017 at 4:09 PM, P F via Boost <boost_at_[hidden]>
>> wrote:
>>
>> >
>> > However, when I upgrade boost, I need to upgrade cmake as well. There
>> > really shouldn’t be a coupling between cmake and boost, like that.
>> Instead
>> > each library can provide the cmake configuration, and we can update
>> cmake’s
>> > FindBoost module to look for these configuration files, or the user can
>> > just call them directly with `find_package(boost_asio)`.
>> >
>>
>> First.. Needing to upgrade cmake to deal with newer releases of Boost is,
>> IMO, a design and implementation defect of cmake.
>>
>> Second.. Why not use something like Conan that doesn't care about what
>> build system your dependencies use and will adjust to the build system you
>> are using for your product?
>>
>>
>> --
>> -- Rene Rivera
>> -- Grafik - Don't Assume Anything
>> -- Robot Dreams - http://robot-dreams.net
>> -- rrivera/acm.org (msn) - grafikrobot/aim,yahoo,skype,efnet,gmail
>>
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