Re: Boost/CMake

From: Christian Mazakas (christian.mazakas_at_[hidden])
Date: 2024-05-22 16:59:06

On Wed, May 22, 2024 at 9:38 AM Peter Dimov via Boost <boost_at_[hidden]>
wrote:

> The only part of Boost suffering from lack of outside contributions is b2
> itself,
> which problem is not going to be solved by dropping b2.
>

Yup. This is the alternative path. With some elbow grease, we could make b2
a lot better.

Maybe it'd be good if we enumerate our gripes with it so we at least have
an outline here.

One of my biggest gripes with it is how permissive it can be in many cases.
It'd be nice if there
 were strict modes where you can require something like zlib and b2 fails
if it's not found. Maybe
this is already supported but who knows.

I think it's also a function of documentation and working examples as well.

Error message output also isn't the best with b2 either. I'm thinking about
the time I forgot to add a:
    using asciidoctor ;

to my user-config.jam. b2's output was absolutely unintelligible to me and
it was even to the people
walking me through the steps.

- Christian