--- In Boost-Users@y..., "obhiee"
hi,
i d/l'ed the 1_27_0 and have successfully built the jam executable. i went through the documentation for build but am still unclear as to the location from where jam should be run. do i just copy jam into the top level directory where the files were extracted to and run it from there after setting BOOST_ROOT?
some posts in this list conveyed the impression that it should be run from within the source library for each library. i find that confusing. isn't it the intent(?) of jam to be able to build the code wherever it may be located provided that the appropriate entry has been made into BOOST_BUILD_PATH/BOOST_ROOT?
It's best to place Jam in some directory along your path. The reason is that in practice you'll probably want to run it from multiple locations. To build all of Boost you set BOOST_ROOT and execute Jam in $BOOST_ROOT. If you need to build/rebuild just a single library of Boost, such as Boost.Threads, you can execute Jam in $BOOST_ROOT/libs/lib_name/build. When you execute Jam from $BOOST_ROOT it actually does exactly this for each library (or, more specifically, it reads and executes the Jamfile located in each library's build directory). Some libraries also include a regression test system that can be run by executing Jam in the $BOOST_ROOT/libs/lib_name/test directory. Further, some libraries contain example programs that can be built by executing Jam in the $BOOST_ROOT/libs/lib_name/example directory. The tests and examples are not built when you execute Jam from the $BOOST_ROOT directory, so in those cases you'll actually have to execute Jam from the specific directories.
i apologize since this post is probably somewhat off-topic.
This isn't off-topic at all. Bill Kempf