Re: [Boost-build] Improving Boost Build?

From: Bojan Resnik (resnikb_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-05-17 17:54:39

2007/5/17, Dean Michael Berris <mikhailberis_at_[hidden]>:
> When I said "let's", I meant people either already involved in the
> effort of documenting it and people who actually want to get involved.
> I obviously am one of the "let's" I refer to, and I was hoping you
> were part of it as well.
>
> Now that the intention is clear that you don't want any part of the
> "let's fix it [documentation]" effort, I guess that leaves just
> Vladimir Prus and I -- and maybe other people who haven't sounded off
> yet [so PLEASE LET US KNOW NOW WHO YOU ARE].

  I am very interested in improving Boost.Build and willing to work on
the project as much as my everyday duties allow it. It has some unique
features that I did not find in other build systems, but also many
shortcomings which should be addressed. I've been using BBv2 at work
for the past year or so, and created dozens of projects with it,
although I didn't grasp much of the underlying jam magic.

> The "bjam being slow and resource hungry" problem might be addressable
> somehow -- how I don't know yet, but I'm guessing it might require
> doing major surgery on the jam codebase (which is in C). It might also
> involve having to use Boost.Graph for the dependency tracking,
> Boost.Spirit for parsing the Jamfiles, Boost.Filesystem to work on the
> files, and maybe Boost.Python to expose these lower level
> services/components to a Python engine which drives the build process
> (using the external tools like compilers, linkers, assemblers,
> whatnot). I don't know if the above makes sense or whether it's
> feasible but leaving the jam legacy code might be a step in the right
> direction.

  IIRC, Alex Besogonov started working on a C++ port a while ago, and
the project was going well at the time. The code is still at
http://bjam-cpp.googlecode.com and might be worth developing further.

> As far as advantages of CMake is concerned, then I would agree that
> there are compelling reasons to make CMake the default build system
> for Boost.

  When I was evaluating build systems for usage at work, I tried CMake
as well but I never managed to make things work as I wanted them.
Besides, there was always the question of relying on an external build
tool for a particular system/compiler. I found BBv2 to most closely
fulfill the needs of my projects.

-- 
Bojan Resnik