[Boost-users] Building boost with a non-default compiler?

From: Dan Katz (dakatz_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-07-07 16:09:55

Hi -

I'm trying to build boost-1.35 on a Linux 2.4 machine where both
gcc-2.95 (the default) and gcc-3.3 (the one I'd like to use) are
installed, and I'm having a lot of problems.  Perhaps you can help me
figure out how to go forward?

Attempt #1 -- use the configure script
========================================================================
To begin, I started by following the online instructions at 

http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_35_0/more/getting_started/unix-variants.html

where it says (section 5.1) "Select your configuration options and
invoke ./configure again...", so I selected the --with-toolset and
--prefix options as follows:

------------------------------------
boost_1_35_0$ ./configure --with-toolset=gcc-3.3 --prefix=./BUILT
Building Boost.Jam with toolset gcc-3.3... ./configure: ./bootstrap/jam0: No such file or directory
tools/jam/src//bjam
Detecting Python version... 2.2
Detecting Python root... /usr
Unicode/ICU support for Boost.Regex?... not found.
Generating Boost.Build configuration in user-config.jam...
Generating Makefile...
boost_1_35_0$
------------------------------------

where I got the idea that the argument to --with-toolset should be
gcc-3.3 from the description of toolsets in section 5.2.2 of the
documentation which describes how to name toolsets for Boost.Build and
states that 

    If you have multiple versions of a particular compiler installed,
    you can append the version number to the toolset name, preceded by a
    hyphen, e.g. intel-9.0 or borland-5.4.3.

Of course, trying to run the generated makefile fails miserably:

------------------------------------
boost_1_35_0$ make install
./tools/jam/src//bjam  --user-config=user-config.jam --prefix=./BUILT --exec-prefix=./BUILT --libdir=./BUILT/lib --includedir=./BUILT/include  install
/bin/sh: ./tools/jam/src//bjam: No such file or directory
Not all Boost libraries built properly.
boost_1_35_0$ 
------------------------------------

At this point I noticed that the documentation for section 5.2 states
that "If you're using a compiler other than your system's default,
you'll need to use Boost.Build to create binaries."  Aha!  Although it
does leave me wondering what the --with-toolset option of the configure
script is for...

Attempt #2 -- Build Custom Binaries
========================================================================
For this attempt, I decided that I'd build everything from scratch.  So
I untarred a fresh source tree and began by building bjam, following the
directions at

    http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_35_0/doc/html/jam/building.html

------------------------------------
$ cd tools/jam/src
$ sh ./build.sh
------------------------------------

which build bjam cleanly using the gcc-2.95 default compiler.  I then
moved back to the root directory as described in section 5.2.4 of the
documentation and invoked bjam as follows:

------------------------------------
$ export PATH=$BOOST_ROOT/tools/jam/src/bin.linuxx86:$PATH
$ bjam --toolset=gcc-3.3 stage
[...tons of stuff about compilation and failure messages...]
...failed updating 57 targets...
...skipped 52 targets...
...updated 188 targets...
$
------------------------------------

and while some of the libraries appear to have bee built, not all of
them have been:

------------------------------------
$ find . -name libboost*
./stage/lib/libboost_signals-gcc33-mt-1_35.so
./stage/lib/libboost_regex-gcc33-mt.so
./stage/lib/libboost_regex-gcc33-mt-1_35.so
./stage/lib/libboost_prg_exec_monitor-gcc33-mt-1_35.so.1.35.0
./stage/lib/libboost_prg_exec_monitor-gcc33-mt-1_35.so
./stage/lib/libboost_signals-gcc33-mt-1_35.so.1.35.0
./stage/lib/libboost_signals-gcc33-mt.so
./stage/lib/libboost_prg_exec_monitor-gcc33-mt.so
./stage/lib/libboost_regex-gcc33-mt-1_35.so.1.35.0
./bin.v2/libs/test/build/gcc-3.3/release/threading-multi/libboost_prg_exec_monitor-gcc33-mt-1_35.so.1.35.0
./bin.v2/libs/regex/build/gcc-3.3/release/threading-multi/libboost_regex-gcc33-mt-1_35.so.1.35.0
./bin.v2/libs/signals/build/gcc-3.3/release/threading-multi/libboost_signals-gcc33-mt-1_35.so.1.35.0
--------------------------------

which clearly shows that a wide variety of the libraries (such as
boost_thread and boost_test) are missing.

So the question is:  do you have any suggestions about how I should
proceed?  I'm willing to capture all of the build output and look for
failure messages to post here, but I thought I should show you what I
did and see if there was anything glaringly wrong before I did that.

Thanks!

Dan