Re: [Boost-build] The future of B2?

Subject: Re: [Boost-build] The future of B2?
From: Rene Rivera (grafikrobot_at_[hidden])
Date: 2016-09-29 23:21:32

On Tue, Sep 27, 2016 at 3:32 AM, alainm <alain.miniussi_at_oca.eu> wrote:

>
>
> On 27/09/2016 02:53, Ryan Gonzalez wrote:
>
> I'm not saying Boost.Build is bad. I love it. It's just that it doesn't
> leave the best first impression, and lots of people give up after the first
> try.
>
> I didn't, I gave up after many month of pain an suffering, debugging and a
> fix that ended up in the trashcan. My two last attempts ended up in a
> hanging b2 (the answer I got the first time went along the lines of "well,
> Intel should fix it's mpi engine to fit our completely unknown tool.", is
> not that useful in the world I live in. Second time, having a background
> script sending appropriate signal to the build process ended up qualifying
> as a convenient solution, didn't bother reporting the issue).
>

That is unfortunate :-( And it shows one current weakness. It's not easy to
extend and customize effectively.

> CMake might be (well, is) a piece of junk, but it's a documented ,
> supported and widespread piece of junk. And I'd probably use AutoTool over
> b2 anyway. At least I have a failsafe on scripting when everything else
> fails.
> Not to mention I do not work in a C++ only universe, and support for
> Fortran and most third party tools seems to be kind of limited.
>
> But yes, documentation would be a nice improvement to consider if world
> domination is under consideration.
>

Perhaps closer to saving the world and less domination ;-)

> Performances is not such an issue when you have parallel build, although
> CMake seems to have a faster startup time for me.
>

My limited experience so far has been that cmake times are not that
different. And when I take into account the human time in the frequent
manual steps it adds up to more.

-- 
-- Rene Rivera
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