Re: Boost/CMake

From: René Ferdinand Rivera Morell (grafikrobot_at_[hidden])
Date: 2024-05-22 00:18:43

On Tue, May 21, 2024 at 5:50 PM Christian Mazakas via Boost
<boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
> 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.

You might consider using some file globbing, on both b2 and cmake, to
make it less likely that happens.

> 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!

As a data point.. I submitted some "test the waters" PRs for b2
modular changes, in reality build and source fixes, for some libraries
some time ago. One of them took 11 months for it to get merged. And it
got merged by a Boost ORG owner instead of the library
author/maintainer.

> In general, I agree with Richard's sentiment. b2 is holding Boost back and

How is it doing that?

> 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.

AFAIK all package managers, except maybe build2, build Boost packages
with B2. Some do use the config.cmake files that the B2 build
generates. Others generate those themselves.

-- 
-- René Ferdinand Rivera Morell
-- Don't Assume Anything  -- No Supone Nada
-- Robot Dreams - http://robot-dreams.net