Re: Boost/CMake

From: Christian Mazakas (christian.mazakas_at_[hidden])
Date: 2024-05-21 22:50:15

On Tue, May 21, 2024 at 2:55 PM Vinnie Falco via Boost <
boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> Are you volunteering to:
> 1. Write new release scripts which use cmake instead of b2,

Maybe we should start considering it, given that we're already running into
discrepancies like so:

On Tue, May 21, 2024 at 11:05 AM Alain O' Miniussi via Boost <
> boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> I use CMake for building and testing Boost.MPI. Not sure I added the last
> tests to the b2 framework.

Fwiw, Unordered is actually kind of guilty of this as well.
Unordered's Jamfile has more tests than its CMake files do.

This certainly isn't ideal and shows the pain of maintaining two separate
build systems.

Rewriting the release script to do its testing and generation of the
install tree via CMake shouldn't be a huge change
in theory, I'd imagine. But I've never looked at the scripts. All I know
is, building Boost via CMake is very doable and
running the tests is similarly doable.

Documentation can still be generated by b2 for now.

3. Submit pull requests to all libs to update their build scripts for cmake
>

This will definitely be the most time-consuming part but if we did a
library a day every day, we'd be done
in like a year!

In general, I agree with Richard's sentiment. b2 is holding Boost back and
nowadays, even packagers
are moving on from it and are building Boost purely via CMake or are
relying on Boost's CMake support.
I'm thinking of vcpkg's modular Boost and CMake's FindBoost now dispatching
to the official boost-config.cmake.

- Christian