[cmake-developers] [PATCH] FindBoost: Add imported targets

[Brad King]

On 11/30/2015 11:54 AM, rleigh at codelibre.net wrote:
> I do worry about the maintenance burden of hardcoding the information in
> the script.

I do too.  We already have to update the script for each Boost release.
This is among the reasons the work is better integrated with upstream
Boost instead.

> How should this cater for dependency changes between boost releases?
> How far back in time does this dependency information need to go?

One would need to fill out tables per version and then detect the
version to populate the info.  Just don't provide imported targets
if the version does not have dependency info available.  If someone
needs it they can run something to fill out the tables for their
version and submit a patch.

> I already did some work towards this goal five years ago:
> 
>   https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/ticket/1094
> 
> See the attached patches.  This was a proof of concept to introspect the
> headers for generation of pkg-config files during the boost build (it uses
> the compiler to dump the dependencies directly), but it could be trivially
> updated for cmake configuration generation.  If I had any clue regarding
> bjam internals, it would have been completed years ago, but I don't have
> the expertise to integrate it to complete the task.
> 
> If there's anyone at all here who understands bjam, your help here would
> be greatly appreciated by many people!

I'm not familiar with bjam or Boost Build v2 enough to help.  However,
once this work is done the problem will be solved and mostly free of
maintenance moving forward.  In the long run, figuring it out there
will be less work than maintaining a huge amount of information in
FindBoost.

-Brad