Re: [jamboost] Unix build+install

From: Rene Rivera (grafik.list_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-12-06 10:38:47

John Maddock wrote:
> Rene,
> 
> I've just run the install routine on Linux again, and I still think there
> are a couple of things that could be improved:
> 
> Header file location:
> 
> I appreciate why you place these in a "versioned" directory, but the result
> is that the headers are not in the users include path, further it's very
> hard to see how a configure script could discover their location
> auto-magically. Likewise anyone building their project from a makefile
> would have to edit all their makefiles etc every time the boost version
> number changes. 

This is the same issue Victor raised. And the conclusion is that yes it's the 
goal to have either symlinks, or equivalent, from an unversioned name to the 
versioned names. The only thing preventing this from occurring for the 1.31 
release is the time to write the BBv1 support for doing that. I'll look at it 
today to see if I can find an easy/fast way of doing it.

> 1) I don't see how an autoconf script can discover the right library version
> suffix.

There's a whole discussion about Open Source Development and the lack of 
Configuration Management in it that I could insert here, but a reference is 
enough ;-)

..Perhaps write a small loop that iterates testing for 
"/usr/local/include/boost-$(V)" to get you a list of all versions installed. 
Then pick the latest??

> 2) I don't see how an autoconf script can discover the right compiler
> suffix.

I don't know much about how autoconf does things so I can't answer that :-) 
But at minimum I would think it could easily construct the toolset part, after 
all it detects the compiler you use. As for the rest.. if you are writing 
makefiles it's not that difficult to write you Makefile.in to have some logic 
for constructing the suffix in the same way we do in a top level / global 
location. And then you have "-l$(BOOST_REGEX) -l$(BOOST_THREAD)", etc.

> Again a symlink would help, certainly for (1), not sure yet about (2).
> 
> Is there a rule for symlinks in boost.build already? I've found one for
> hardlinks, but not surprisingly for symlinks?

No rule for symlinks, at least not in BBv1... There is one in BBv2 ;-)

-- 
-- Grafik - Don't Assume Anything
-- Redshift Software, Inc. - http://redshift-software.com
-- rrivera_at_[hidden] - grafik_at_[hidden] - 102708583_at_icq