Re: [boost] Optional third-party libraries

Subject: Re: [boost] Optional third-party libraries
From: Stefan Seefeld (stefan_at_[hidden])
Date: 2017-12-09 19:56:37

Hi,

(Rene, there is a question for you at the end.)

On 09.12.2017 14:37, James E. King, III via Boost wrote:
> The boost documentation on the web site talks about building boost from
> source, but I don't see information on how to leverage optional third party
> libraries easily accessible in the documentation from the place the user
> will most likely end up: "Building From Source".  This information seems to
> be tucked away in documentation of various components, making it difficult
> to actually build a complete boost.

True.
> I think it would be a good idea to bring this information up to the top
> level build instructions, at the very least itemize these third party
> packages and then link to the relevant project-specific documentation pages
> that talk about configuring to use them.
>
> Here are the third party optional libraries I know about so far and the
> libraries that use them:
>
> bzip2 (iostreams)
> iconv (locale - if icu not available)
> icu (locale, regex)
> lzma (iostreams)
> openssl (asio, beast)
> pthread-win32 (sync, thread)
> zlib (beast, gil, iostreams)
>
> Any others?

openmpi or mpich2 (mpi)
python (python)
libjpeg, libpng, zlib, libtiff (gil)

>   Would folks find it useful if this information was part of the
> standard "Building From Source" sections of the upper layers of
> documentation?

That would be useful indeed. Note however that not all of these
dependencies are needed at build-time (some are header-only libraries,
so the dependency needs to be met by the boost user, not necessarily the
person who builds and packages boost.

Also, I'd be curious how this is dealt with by the conan packaging
logic. I would expect it to be best to pull this kind of information
from project-specific metadata, such as the meta/libraries.json file.
Rene, can you comment on how this is done there ?

Stefan

-- 
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