Some fundamental misunderstandings (v2)

From: Mark Elston (m.elston_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-06-12 18:07:29

I guess I have some really basic misunderstandings regarding
how to use Jam/BJam. I have tried this several times and keep
coming up with the same issues.

Perhaps the documentation isn't all there yet, or perhaps I'm not
all there yet, but I just can't get bjam to do what I want yet.
I will add that trying to set up my environment to use bjam was
an exercise in frustration for a while until I pulled together
all the information from different places to make it work.

Here are the steps I have gone through and the results for the
latest set of problems. BTW, I am running on Windows XP.

First I retrieved boost_build-2.0-m9.1.zip from sourceforge.
I extracted it and built it by running build.bat passing the msvc
parameter to the batch file. Everything built fine so I copied
jam.exe and bjam.exe into my PATH.

I went to the user-config.jam file in the build root directory
and put 'using msvc ;' at the to of the file. I then uncommented
the 'using gcc ;' line below it.

I then opened a cmd.exe window and set the BOOST_BUILD_PATH to
point to the boost-build directory.

I then cd'd into the example/libraries directory and ran bjam
without any parameters. Everything seemed to build just fine
except I got the following three lines in the build output:

warning: using independent target <lib1/msvc/debug>lib1.dll
warning: using independent target <lib1/msvc/debug>lib1.rsp
warning: using independent target <app/msvc/debug>app.rsp

Next I ran 'bjam -sTOOLS=gcc'. I expected the same stuff to be
built with the Cygwin gcc I have installed. However, nothing 
got built.

So, I tried commenting out the 'using msvc ;' line in user-config.jam
and re-running bjam. This time the build occurred in bin/gcc/...

So, has support for the TOOLS variable been removed? The documentation
seems to support the use of this variable.

Another issue I have noticed is something I mentioned in a previous
email. bjam, when compiling with gcc, has some - apparently - fixed
parameters to the gcc command line. These include -Wall and
-ftemplate-depth-100. How can I change these?

Another issue is that we would like to provide a "common" build
environment for all the developers on a project to use. Rather than
tell them "get the boost-build package and build it, ..." we would
like to put together a pre-built binary with bjam and all its supporting
files. What would that list of files include. I assume there is some
set of the directories under the boost-build directory that must be 
available when using bjam. However, I cannot find any documentation
that says "here is what you need in your environment". I assume you
don't need the jam-src, example, or doc sub-directories. Which, if any,
of the other directories do you need?

Mark

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Mark Elston
melston_at_[hidden]
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