From reading the documentation on boost.org, I have gotten the impression I don't need to set $BOOST_BUILD_PATH and $BOOST_ROOT. I'm more than a little confused about how I should use the boost libraries. Part of this comes from the fact that it is not clear to me exactly where the demarkation is between using the build system to build boost, and using it to build my own programs. Some of my confusion comes from the appearant change in configuration requirements described in the documentation. It is suggested I don't need the environment variable used with earlier releases. One of these variables is $BOOST_ROOT, which the documentation used as an example of how to build boost. That example was exactly what I successfully (I believe) build the libraries with.
I'm using SuSE Linux 9.1 on a P4 box. Some basic questions are these: When I downloaded and built boost, I first fetched the source for bjam. This is the name of the file I downloaded: boost-jam-3.1.10.tgz It compiled quite nicely, and I copied the resulting bjam jam mkjambase and yyacc to a location in my path. Are there anything other things such as configuration files I need to reside with the binary executables? Are there necessary configuration file that I need to have visible to these programs, even if they are not colocated? I then build boost with the command: bjam --prefix=$BOOST_ROOT "-sTOOLS=gcc" install after setting my BOOST_ROOT the way I wanted it. That resulted in two directories being placed in $BOOST_ROOT/ one is called $BOOST_ROOT/include/ the other is called $BOOST_ROOT/lib/. Under $BOOST_ROOT/include/ I have <path>/boost-1_31/boost/ which contains dozens of header files. I added $BOOST_ROOT/include/boost-1_31 to my $INCLUDE_PATH, and $BOOST_ROOT/lib to my $LIBRARY_PATH and $LD_LIBRARY_PATH variables. Is this the correct way to configure my system to use boost? Is there anything else I need to do in order to compile my programs against the boost headers and libraries? Will the boost libraries work as well as other, comperable libraries using autotools rather than bjam? Are there any special accommodations I need to make in order to use boost with the gnu build tools? Do I need to do anything special to use boost with bjam that does not involve placing files in my current project directories? For example, do I need to provide a global configuration file of some kind? Is it a preferred option, even if not strictly required? There is much remaining in the source directory where I compiled boost. Is that something I need to also put in an accessible place on my system? If so, what so I need to put where, and how to I modify my environment variable to facilitate its use? -- Regards, Steven