[Boost-users] boost 1.55 build / install on OSX - why are aliases used instead of symlinks?

Subject: [Boost-users] boost 1.55 build / install on OSX - why are aliases used instead of symlinks?
From: Colby Boles (cboles_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-05-08 18:22:53

I recently installed and built boost 1.55 on an OSX machine of mine.
With my current make system for my app (qmake) I needed to specify where
the lib and include directories for boost were and thought the best
thing to do would be to set them to

\usr\local\lib
\usr\local\include

where I can see in the lib case there are links to the various library
modules and in the include case there is a link to the boost include
directories.

The problem is that the boost installation makes these links using
aliases instead of symlinks, so everything appears fine browsing in the
Finder, but at the command line, the compiler can't see these
directories. I'm able to change the aliases to symlinks, or point to the
actual boost directories (e.g. \usr\local\Cellar\boost\1.55.0_1\*) and
everything works, but it seems like the intention was to have symlinks
at \usr\local\lib and \usr\local\include so that one can just point to
these places and be version agnostic?

Thanks,

Colby