Re: [Boost-build] [Bulk] Re: [Bulk] Re: [Bulk] Re: [Bulk] CMake Announcement from Boost Steering Committee?

Subject: Re: [Boost-build] [Bulk] Re: [Bulk] Re: [Bulk] Re: [Bulk] CMake Announcement from Boost Steering Committee?
From: Chambers, Matthew (matt.chambers42_at_[hidden])
Date: 2017-08-14 16:05:27

On 8/14/2017 10:10 AM, Douglas Capeci via Boost-build wrote:
> I have found that most cMake advocates don't really understand how much better of a world Boost Build offers. They also have a hard time 
> getting out of the dinosaur cave to give up the old arduous ways of maintaining complex Makefile based build systems to simply learn JAM. 
> I would argue that the current cMake product front-end (and that is all it is...) is the result of cMake developers taking a hard and 
> close look at Boost Build and understanding its elegance and superiority.
I believe that CMake became popular in the open source community precisely because maintaining CMakefiles is very much like maintaining an 
autotools system Makefile, plus it also makes Visual C++ projects for native Windows support (cue applause). Switching to cmake, after using 
autotools for a long time, doesn't require rethinking what a build system should do.

Boost.Build could probably use a "Why Boost.Build instead of Makefiles?" motivational tutorial. My autotools-fu was never that great to 
begin with, so I wouldn't be the right one to write it, that's for sure.

As for existing Boost libs dropping support for Boost.Build, I'm not too concerned. I use Rene's boost-ext.jam extensions file and update it 
whenever I need a new lib from Boost, or updating Boost requires necessitates changes to it.

-Matt