Q's regarding general use of bjam

From: Dan Muller (gclbb-jamboost_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-08-30 13:18:45

I'm new to Jam. I just spent a couple of days struggling with it, and 
have a few questions about using bjam with Boost.Build to build 
non-Boost projects. I'm using the prebuilt bjam and Boost 1.28.0.

Here's how I've set things up so far. In the root of my project, I have 
a boost-build.jam file with these two lines:

BOOST_ROOT = $(.boost-build-file:D) ;
boost-build tools/boost_1_28_0/tools/build ;

(I have boost installed in a subdirectory of my project work area.) I 
have a subdirectory with a simple subproject Jamfile.

I build using MinGW and STLport on WinXP. I copied gcc-stlport-tools.jam 
to mingw-stlport-tools.jam and hacked it a bit, mostly by replacing 
"gcc-" with "mingw-".

I've gotten this all to work, by looking at a lot of jam files in 
tools\build. :-) But I still have a number of small questions.

1. Is it possible to have a single rule invocation in my project Jamfile 
that will build either a static library or a DLL? Or do I have to invoke 
both the 'lib' and 'dll' rules? (They would both get the same target and 
sources.) I'm assuming that the 'dll' rule is a no-op on UNIX systems.

2. After building a dll, what grist do I use to refer separately to the 
module and link libraries? I'd like to copy them to different locations 
using 'stage'.

3. I tried at one point to invoke the File rule directly, but this 
caused the forward-slashes that I used in the rule invocation to appear 
directly in the 'copy' shell command line, making Windows' 'copy' 
unhappy. How does one get the Boost.Build system to translate path 
separators appropriately? Surely I don't have to build literal paths 
using $(SLASH).

4. As mentioned earlier, I'm using the prebuilt bjam and Build.Boost 
from 1.28. Would my life be significantly easier if I used Boost.Build 
v2 from the head of CVS?

Other interesting notes on problems that I solved:

1. I had trouble doing a statically-linked build. The link step picks 
the wrong STLport library: stlport_mingw32_stldebug instead of 
stlport_mingw32_stldebug_static. I modified these lines to add the 
_static suffix in my mingw-stlport-tools.jam:

flags mingw-stlport FINDLIBS <runtime-link>static/<runtime-build>debug
: stlport_$(GCC_STLPORT_LIB_ID)_stldebug_static ;
flags mingw-stlport FINDLIBS 
<runtime-link>static/<runtime-build>release : 
stlport_$(GCC_STLPORT_LIB_ID)_static ;

Apparently, this problem occured because of differences in STLport's 
makefiles for gcc-cygwin and gcc-mingw.

2. Originally, I had my mingw-stlport-tools.jam file in Boost's 
tools/build directory, but I didn't like this. It took me a while to 
figure out how to correctly set BOOST_BUILD_PATH, because I tried the 
more complicated techniques first. :-) For instance, I tried invoking 
boost-build in boost-build.jam twice, or with two arguments. Who 
would've thunk that I could just augment this path in Jamrules with a 
simple '+='. :-)