Re: [Boost-build] portability

From: Rene Rivera (grafikrobot_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-12-16 00:12:19

Xavier Pegenaute wrote:
> just for curiosity is there any concrete reason to don't do it? I
> thought that it is so common when you are developing portable code.

One of the reasons not to do it is that it doesn't help when 
cross-compiling portable code. Since such checks usually only test the 
host system they give misleading information for your real target 
system. Regardless, I've mentioned, and asked in the form of Google 
Summer of Code proposals, for such features myself before. My problem is 
that we need people who are willing to build such infrastructure into BB.

> May be is there any other way to control these kind of checks?

There are various ways of accomplishing similar results. Boost library 
code uses the approach of using preprocessor configuration. One solution 
I use is to create things link config.h files, as might be produced by 
autoconf, based directly on the target os of BB. For example the expat 
BB extension I wrote 
<http://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/browser/sandbox/tools/build_extensions/ext/expat.jam>. 
I use that same pattern in many of the other extensions I have in that 
project. Hence I'm looking for ways of generalizing the behavior. 
Another use case I've seen people post about in this list is in using 
<cxxfalgs>`some-config --cxxflags` to use the configure generated 
scripts from other libraries directly in the compile commands.

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