Rene Rivera wrote:
So you might be better off just telling users that they need to have some minimum Boost version and leave it at that. Most developers are smart enough to go get the Boost source and configure their compiler to know about it, on their own.
OK so what does "on their own" mean. Because Boost headers include themselves with <boost/whatever.hpp> boost MUST be in the compiler include path. That means it must be installed for the user's compiler path somehow. On Linux there is /usr/include which is OK to install stuff to but what about on Windows? For mingw32 there is no user include directory. One thing I could do is expect the user to put the boost directory in some environment variable like BOOST_DIR or whatever, for mingw and gcc/linux. If it's defined it will add a -IBOOST_DIR, otherwise it will assume it's in the standard compiler include path somehow (which on Linux will include /usr/include). What about MSVC? MSVC has an option to add directories into the compiler's include path. I could ask them to put that there, but one person in a chat channel said they wouldn't like that. Well I'm sure they wouldn't like me copying mini-boost to their VC\include so I'm not sure what to ask of them. If I don't copy files into VC\include or have them add the Boost to their path in non-project options, the only other solution I have is to make some sort of script system to replace the path with Boost in all of my 20 or so vcproj files for both debug and release modes, something I REALLY do not want to do, partly because I see it as a hack, and partly because it would just screw up my CVS having non-workable MSVC project files around. Here is ideally what I want: My boost is simple boost 1.30 unmodifed whatsoever but just the headers I need. If they don't have Boost at all and don't care about using Boost directly they can install my 100k or so mini-Boost files. If they are willing to download a 10 meg Boost lib, or have the full Boost, I would like them to use that. My Boost is entirely unmodified and since my lib is open source I encourage them to compile my lib with the latest versions of the dependencies. I'd love nothing more than to see people willing to download the 10meg Boost for my 300k library and delete my mini-Boost. Thanks for your comments thus far, they have been the most helpful of any forum and chat channel so far. Jason Winnebeck