Getting started with Boost Build and Linking to Boost libraries

From: Jason Stewart (jstewart_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-09-22 10:21:05

All of the traffic about scons vs. Boost.Build vs. make, etc. has 
made me decide to revisit our choice for a build system. We have been 
using Ant fairly successfully for about 2 years but I don't like the 
difficulty of setting up a new project. Basically, I'm the only one 
who knows how and I tend to cut and paste from another project that 
is similar because it's too verbose to get right from memory. Our 
compile speed is important but not critical, though I would hate for 
it to get slower.

So, I've decided to try a couple of our smaller libraries with boost 
build v2 and evaluate the difficulty of setting it up. I admit that 
the apparent complexity of boost build has made me shy away from it 
in the past. However I really like the way using a dependent library 
can modify the include path or compiler options for the using 
project. That is one of the compelling reasons that I have decided to revisit.

I have been able to get one of our simpler libraries working and it 
was very reasonable. I like the fact that it understands the unit 
tests and can run them automatically.

Unfortunately, the second library used several boost libraries and 
the test harness used the boost unit test framework. (I say 
unfortunately only because I have not been able to get it to link, we 
love the boost libraries we are using). I added the include path in 
the project root's Jamfile and it compiles but I get a link error 
because the boost unit test framework does not automatically link. I 
apologize if this is a dumb question but I cannot figure out how to 
add a library to the link command. There is an example in the 
documentation but for some reason I find it confusing and it doesn't 
make clear how it handles a library whose name depends on the compile 
time flags (i.e. libboost_unit_test_framework-vc71-mt-gd-1_33.lib).

Any help would be appreciated.

Jason Stewart