What is the point of project-root.jam/Jamroot?

From: David Abrahams (dave_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-12-27 03:31:34

Having read through all the Boost.Build documentation, I can't
understand why it's important to have this file/distinction anymore.
What is the point of searching upward for that file upon startup? It
seems to me that a more sensible approach would be to search upward for
parent projects of any project that declares itself to have a subproject ID:

project my-project/foo ;

would cause a search upward for a parent Jamfile, whereas

project my-project ;

would not.

The current situation where subproject IDs can be entirely unrelated to
project structure is highly counterintuitive. Why should this be possible:

Directory Project ID
foo quanset/hut
foo/bar blackguard
foo/bar/baz old/socks
foo/bar/boo tired/horse

??

I don't buy for one minute the tutorial's justification that the project
directory structure can be changed without rewriting any Jamfiles. One
typically doesn't have so many Jamfiles or restructure projects so often
that fixing these references is a big deal.

-- 
Dave Abrahams
Boost Consulting
http://www.boost-consulting.com