Re: [jamboost] Boost.Jam tasks for 3.1.5...

From: Vladimir Prus (ghost_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-02-25 02:20:58

Rene Rivera wrote:
> Some organizational items... Here's a TODO list for Boost.Jam.
>

> * Implement an "output = SYSTEM ( command args * )" builtin. Usefull for
> doing things like detection of default compilers and their availablity.
> Also usefull for building lists of source files more complicated than
> possible with GLOB. The one usecase I have for the later is building
> wxWindows. - Difficulty: HARD?

I would like to have a C++ library to run a program and read its output, so I 
have some minor interest in implementation of this -- but it's not likely 
enough to really do this ;-)

Another thought is that we better not implement this from scratch, but use
the part of Apache Portable Runtime (http://apr.apache.org). Not sure how
much dependencies it will drag.

> Any others? Comments?

There's another issue. We have SEARCH_FOR_TARGET builtin, which is 
used to correctly handle dependencies to generated headers. The problem is
that it's is 
1. Strange from the user-perspective: see the long body of c-scanner.process 
in builtin.jam: a lot of work is needed to just scan a header.

2. Ugly implementation-wise: it basically requires some copy-paste and 
cleaning it up is very hard.

Recently, Matt Armstrong suggested another alternative, see the end of

http://maillist.perforce.com/pipermail/jamming/2003-February/001949.html

and also

http://maillist.perforce.com/pipermail/jamming/2003-February/001963.html

This is basically fix for the Jam core and I even implemented it. I'm going to 
commit it someday when I have more time.

- Volodya