Re: [boost] Proposal for moving Boost to CMake

Subject: Re: [boost] Proposal for moving Boost to CMake
From: John Maddock (jz.maddock_at_[hidden])
Date: 2017-06-22 17:10:08

On 22/06/2017 13:11, Peter Dimov via Boost wrote:
> Thomas Heller wrote:
>> One way to go here is to have one Config.cmake for each build type. 
>> For example structured like this:
>>
>> lib/cmake/boost-vc141-mt-1_65-dynamic/boost_system-config.cmake
>> lib/cmake/boost-vc141-mt-1_65-static/boost_system-config.cmake
>> lib/cmake/boost-vc141-mt-gd-1_65-dynamic/boost_system-config.cmake
>> lib/cmake/boost-vc141-mt-gd-1_65-static/boost_system-config.cmake
>> lib/cmake/boost-vc141-mt-s-1_65-dynamic/boost_system-config.cmake
>> lib/cmake/boost-vc141-mt-s-1_65-static/boost_system-config.cmake
>> lib/cmake/boost-vc141-mt-sgd-1_65-dynamic/boost_system-config.cmake
>> lib/cmake/boost-vc141-mt-sgd-1_65-static/boost_system-config.cmake
>

Yikes, I thought this was supposed to make things simpler/better?

Whatever we end up with, it needs to be something that cmake-o-phobes 
like myself that have never looked inside a cmake file can still 
maintain relatively easily.

With regard to Windows / msvc usage, I see two main usage requirements:

1) The ability to build all the variants we do at present, so that folks 
can just build Boost as they do now, and then point their IDE at the 
directory containing the .lib files.
2) The ability to take the Visual Studio files generated by CMake, and 
add the library targets directly to their own project "solutions" so 
that their own projects can reference them.

#1 we do already, #2 would be a very useful feature for Visual Studio 
users - way more useful than being able to reference Boost from other 
CMake files for folks like me.  Probably the easiest way to support 
those two, would be to have a *single* CMake target for each library 
(which generates a single VS project, OK may have to be 2 - one static 
and one dll), and then a separate install step that renames the lib/dll 
depending on how it was built.

I also noticed someone wanting to link debug application with release 
Boost library: but you can't in general do that with the Visual Studio 
builds - the whole reason we support all these variants is that they are 
built against different runtime libraries and are therefore binary 
incompatible.  What you can do, is build a debug library (as in links to 
the debug runtime) but turn on optimizations.  BTW These variants along 
with auto-linking were things I introduced with Regex long before it was 
in Boost - before that I used to get a couple of support requests a week 
from folks trying to link incompatible binaries, building all the 
variants along with the auto-linking killed that problem dead.  And 
boost usage has exploded hugely since those early days.  Just trying to 
emphasise how important the feature is ;)

And now I'll go back to lurking, John.

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