Re: [boost] [cmake] Pull request announcement

Subject: Re: [boost] [cmake] Pull request announcement
From: Alexander Grund (alexander.grund_at_[hidden])
Date: 2018-09-14 14:05:12

The major problem I see are the variants.

- b2 can build multiple variants in one go (static, dynamic, runtimes...)
- Encoding these variants has to be reflected in the target names/aliases

CMake FindBoost solves this by requiring to set some variables to select 
a set of variants and set the appropriate aliases to this set.

Think about how you reflect this in the CMake buildsystem. E.g. some 
libraries may depend explicitly on a static or dynamic version of 
another library (which can be expressed in bjam)

> The practical problem for most libraries, which are largely 
> header-only, is converting the library jamfile for tests and building 
> docs into CMake terms. Building non-header only libraries is actually 
> much less of a problem for converting from Boost Build to CMake, even 
> if it will get the vast majority of the comments 
This won't be to bad either once the variants problem above is solved. 
CTest is quite powerful so except for a few corner cases I expect it to 
be straight forward.