[CMake] CMakeifying Boost

[Brandon J. Van Every]

John Biddiscombe wrote:
> I know the subject has come up a couple of times... I'm fed up with 
> having to install boost on every system I have to compiled something 
> on. I'd like to have a Boost utility dir in my source which will build 
> itself along with all the other cmake controlled projects. (Preferably 
> broken into Boost::lib1, Boost::lib2 etc etc modules)
>
> I've used boost a lot, but never spent much time looking at the 
> configuration or build. Has anyone given much though to how hard it'd 
> be to CMakeify Boost?
> (And even if the boost maintainers aren't interested in using CMake, 
> we could put together a distro once every few months with a latest 
> release...)
>
> Anyone got any views?
Judging by my difficulties getting Chicken to build, it'll be impossible 
without the CVS version of CMake.  You are going to need the features 
and bugfixes of CMake 2.3.

Another issue you'll have to contend with is political buy-in.  Boost is 
a big, stable project.  The CMake documentation is not adequate.  So it 
is very unlikely that you're going to convince the Boost guys to adopt a 
CMake build.  Instead, you will learn all the little details of CMake, 
have that knowledge stored up in your own head, and will be solely stuck 
with advancing and maintaining a CMake Boost build.  It will be a *lot* 
of work, and unless some people pop up and say, "yes! yes! I really want 
to work on that!" nobody's going to help you.  Maybe you'll get some 
takers from around here, the people who already know CMake.  I doubt 
you'll get any from the Boost list.

Documentation is CMake's Achilles heel and will be the next thing I turn 
my attention to, after I get Chicken working and achieve some 
productivity with it.  I helped start the CMake-Promote list, but IMO it 
is not worth promoting CMake until we have better documentation.  Also 
CMake 2.3 needs to ship.  There are several basic features that need to 
be available to people, like the ability to set shared vs. static flags 
on a per-target basis.  Can't do that in CMake 2.2.3.  I would also like 
to see the liblib problem fully eradicated.  It is embarrassing trying 
to explain that one to the Unix / Cygwin / MinGW crowd.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every