[cmake-developers] Boost 1.63 support

[Roger Leigh]

On 27/12/2016 14:34, Gregor Jasny via cmake-developers wrote:
> Hello,
>
> On 27/12/2016 13:20, Roger Leigh wrote:
>> I opened the following merge request to add support for the
>> newly-released Boost 1.63:
>>
>>   https://gitlab.kitware.com/cmake/cmake/merge_requests/361
>
> I wonder what's the reason for stating explicitly all the released
> versions? It they are necessary at all, couldn't they be added in
> speculative batches of 10 or so?

It would certainly be possible to add additional versions ahead
of time.  What would be more difficult are the component dependencies, 
which are needed for the imported targets.

That said, the dependency introspection script can compute these on the 
fly, at the expense of taking several minutes to grind through all the 
sources and headers.  We could potentially fall back to computing them 
if the embedded dependency information is missing, though it does make 
assumptions about the autolink macros in the headers--if they ever 
changed then it would need updating.

Fundamentally, the current approach is an overly complicated hack to 
work around the fact that Boost has never exported this information in a 
form consumable by any build system, leading to projects hardcoding all 
this information (or doing it in a single place as here).


Regards,
Roger