Re: [boost] CMake Announcement from Boost Steering Committee

Subject: Re: [boost] CMake Announcement from Boost Steering Committee
From: Peter Dimov (lists_at_[hidden])
Date: 2017-07-22 11:40:27

Roger Leigh wrote:

> I ended up writing this; it's in a CMake script, so it's a bit verbose:
>
> https://gitlab.kitware.com/cmake/cmake/blob/master/Utilities/Scripts/BoostScanDeps.cmake

The problem is that the Boost release doesn't contain libs/*/include, so 
there's no way for FindBoost to compute the info. You have to run the above 
on a git clone, and you obviously can't do that before the release is 
available.

But we could have put something like the output of 
`boostdep --list-dependencies` and `boostdep --list-buildable` in the 
release, which would have enabled FindBoost.cmake to do an educated guess 
and try to do its best when faced with a new release instead of failing.

It's not possible to include the actual library names in that though - those 
aren't known until `b2 install` time. Just what boostdep gives, 
repo/module-level dependencies.

Oh well.

> If I need multiple configurations, I build them separately and explicitly; 
> I don't expect it of the build system itself.

Well you don't have much of a choice, do you. :-) People who are accustomed 
to b2 supporting multiple configs find themselves expecting it of their 
build system. :-)

CMake has a half-hearted support for multiple configs; it would be 
interesting if it moves even further in this direction and adds support 
for --platform in addition to --config.