BBv1 / BBv2 thoughts/questions/comments

From: Alo Sarv (alo17_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-07-20 00:06:45

I recently started using BB in my medium-sized project. Initially I used 
BBv1, and then few days later as BBv2. I must say I don't regret the 
switch (I was formerly using GNU build tools, and only MSVC proj files 
on win32); the reason behind the switch was to help with project 
scalability - GNU tools were no longer sufficient, but with BB, it's 
much better now.

However, I do have some questions/comments, as first-time BB user 
(probably some are FAQ - I did browse the list, but might'v missed some):

1. Why was the single bin/ directory replaced with multiple bin/ 
directories all over the hierarchy? With BBv1, it was very convenient to 
rm -rf bin/ to get rid of everything, now one has to go through bunch of 
subdirs to find all the bin/ dirs (and no, bjam --clean isn't a solution 
- it still leaves stuff behind, especially when you'r working on the 
build system, adding/removing targets etc).

2. Why does msvc build display the source files separately during build, 
but no other toolset do? I understand it's "standard" for MSVC to show 
that (e.g. when launched from IDE), but shouldn't all toolsets generate 
roughly the same output?

3. What's the status of QT4 support? I saw some posts about it here, 
does anyone have a working version for it?

4. Is it worth at all trying to use BB from 1.32 distribution, or should 
I use CVS snapshot? In other words, how fast is BB evolving right now, 
is 8-months old version hopelessly out of date for real-world use?

5. Just a note about the manual from someone who just spent 4 days 
learning BB - BBv2 manual IS a lot better than v1 one, but the 
organization is bit rough, it's hard to find specific things in it, so 
you end up clicking through all the pages each time you need a specific 
thing. You can't just hop in there to look up a single thing, you'd have 
to read the entire manual in detail (at least once) to get the features 
overview ...

Keep up the good work on BB :)

Alo