[Boost-users] Mingw: build, install, .LIB files and boost-config?

Subject: [Boost-users] Mingw: build, install, .LIB files and boost-config?
From: John Pye (john.pye_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-01-28 21:07:30

Hi all

While I'm aware that MinGW is not one of the 'primary' platforms for 
MinGW, I wanted to ask a few questions to help me in the task of 
building a binary copy of Boost for this platform that's as good as it 
can be.

Firstly, what would be the correct build commands to build Boost for 
MinGW such that I end up with both shared libraries and static 
libraries? What I've worked out so far is shown here:
http://ascendwiki.cheme.cmu.edu/Binary_installer_for_Boost_on_MinGW

Secondly, to install Boost at an arbitrary path under MinGW, what is the 
correct BJAM command? On MinGW, I'm not running ./configure, so the 
suggestions from the Unix build documentation don't make sense. By 
default under MinGW, if I run "bjam install", my files end up in 
c:\Boost but I'd like too have another target directory, so that it's 
possible to build even without write privileges to that folder. Is there 
such a thing as "bjam --install-prefix=c:/MinGW install"? Is there a way 
to strip out all the redundant folder levels like "release" and 
"gcc-mingw-3.4.5" etc?

Third, using BJAM on MinGW results in .LIB files being generated. These 
.LIB files are NOT correctly names for use with MinGW. As far as I can 
tell, I have to rename them as .A files, or else do something else with 
them so that they'll correctly be detected by the the GCC "-l" linker flag.

Finally, there was a bit of discussion on the mailing list about a year 
ago about providing a "boost-config" script. With the ever-changing 
naming conventions for Boost libs, and the possible presence of static 
libraries, shared libraries, -mt, -d, and other file suffixes, such a 
script would be INVALUABLE for people looking to access pre-built Boost 
binaries for their projects. It would be an almost trivial task to 
implement such a script -- has there been any progress on this anywhere? 
Can I suggest that for MinGW, a native shell script, with file paths 
constructed relative to the boost-config path, would probably be the 
best way, rather than pkg-config, which is not available in MinGW/MSYS 
by default.

Feel free to direct me to the online documentation of this stuff if it 
exists -- I couldn't find it though.

Cheers
JP

-- 
John Pye
Dept of Engineering
Australian National University
http://pye.dyndns.org/