From: Doug Gregor (dgregor_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-05-01 16:22:24
On Apr 30, 2007, at 3:29 PM, Vladimir Prus wrote:
> Richard Hadsell wrote:
>> First, the environment variables seemed to have no effect on the
>> user-config.jam. When I ran bjam afterward, it still used the
>> default
>> installed g++ on my system. So in user-config.jam I changed
>> 'using gcc
>> ;' to 'using gcc : 3.4.4 : /opt/gcc344/bin/g++344 ;'. (This was
>> similar
>> to a 'using' statement that I saw in a comment in
>> tools/build/v2/user-config.jam.)
>
> I'm starting to wonder if "configure" script being shipped with
> Boost is
> a good idea. The idea is to make standard "./configure && make"
> work, however,
> as above posting shows, "configure" is associated with various
> expected behaviour, and unless we want to duplicate all such
> behaviour,
> we can end up confusing users.
While we should probably fix this behavior of "configure" to do the
same thing as an autoconf-generated "configure", I don't think that
this problem makes having a "configure" script any less of a good
idea. The "configure" script handles the common case very well; it's
much easier for people accustomed to *nix software than bjam will
ever be.
Let me put it this way: since I wrote the "configure" script for
Boost, the number of times I've been told that Boost is too hard to
build (e.g., at conferences and workshops) has decreased
*drastically*. bjam is powerful, but it's non-traditional. For all of
the failures of autotools (and there are many!), *nix programmers
understand how to build autotools-based projects and can do it very,
very easily. "./configure && make && make install" is enough for the
vast majority of the open source projects in the world.
- Doug