Re: [Boost-build] Improving Boost Build?

From: Dean Michael Berris (mikhailberis_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-05-18 11:10:33

Hi Bojan!

On 5/17/07, Bojan Resnik <resnikb_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> 2007/5/17, Dean Michael Berris <mikhailberis_at_[hidden]>:
> >
> > 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.
>

That makes us three! Yay! :-)

> > 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.
>

That's odd, http://code.google.com/p/bjam-cpp/ says it's licensed
under the New BSD License. Are we sure we're not going to encounter
licensing problems here? IANAL, and I don't know how re-licensing
would work unless the copyright holder explicitly allows it... Again
though, IANAL.

> > 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.
>

We should be putting this in a site somewhere... Praise and Reviews
for Boost.Build v2 ? :D

Thanks for sounding off Bojan! :-)

-- 
Dean Michael C. Berris
http://cplusplus-soup.blogspot.com/
mikhailberis AT gmail DOT com
[phone]