Re: [jamboost] The state of building jam...

From: David Abrahams (dave_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-10-29 22:47:34

Rene Rivera <grafik666_at_[hidden]> writes:

> A while ago I was looking at using and testing jam on the Win32 side of my
> x86 box, but I ran into a problem. There are only a small number of
> compilers supported for building jam itself in Win32: MSVC, cygwin, and
> borland. But even though I have borland installed, I wanted to use my
> prefered compiler in Win32... CodeWarrior. So I decided to add support for
> that, but after seeing all the various build scripts and instructions in
> jam_src I got frustrated at trying to change the Jambase to support it. So I
> decided to write a new set of scripts to compile jam(bjam) instead.
> 
> I'm attaching the first pass at them... here are some of the highlights:
> 
> * Much simpler than the current Makefiles plus scripts.
> * Tries to autodetect the compiler to use.
> * No reliance on make, gmake, nmake, etc. Only on SH and BAT (Unix, Win32
> respectively)
> * Much easier to add more platforms and compilers.
> * Only 3 files, so far, build.sh, build.bat, and build.jam would replace:
> common.mk, debugjam0.bat, debugjam0.sh, makecygwindebugjam.bat,
> makedebugjam.bat, makedebugjam.sh, Makefile, builds/win32-borlandc.mk,
> builds/win32-gcc.mk, and builds/visualc.mk.
> (Or will when the functionality of all those is incorporated, or deemed
> useless)
> * It removes our dependence on the build code in Jambase. And we can put
> back in the stock Perforce Jambase instead of the FTJam code.
> 
> Things still missing:
> * More testing, build.bat has blind changes, and since I don't have MSVC
> can't test that (and I'm sure it won't work as is).
> * Documentation :-), of course now the build documentation should be much
> simpler: "Invoke './build.sh' in Unix, or '.\build.bat' in Win32."
> * VMS support?
> 
> So is this something I should put into CVS? That is do we want to support
> such scripts?

Rene,

I'm extremely excited about this effort! I definitely think we should
do something like this. I'm also traveling at the moment and
preoccupied with many obligations and other things. However, I intend
to focus on Boost install/build issues starting 11/2. If you feel you
haven't got enough feedback by that time, please raise the issue
again. Have you considered using the Jam extensions for examining the
windows registry (one of the other Perforce users did it) to locate
the compiler to build bjam with?

-- 
David Abrahams
dave_at_[hidden] * http://www.boost-consulting.com