Rene Rivera wrote:
So you might be better off just telling users that they need to have some
minimum Boost version and leave it at that. Most developers are smart enough
to go get the Boost source and configure their compiler to know about it, on
their own.
OK so what does "on their own" mean.
Because Boost headers include themselves with boost
MUST be in the compiler include path. That means it must be installed
for the user's compiler path somehow. On Linux there is /usr/include
which is OK to install stuff to but what about on Windows? For mingw32
there is no user include directory.
One thing I could do is expect the user to put the boost directory in
some environment variable like BOOST_DIR or whatever, for mingw and
gcc/linux. If it's defined it will add a -IBOOST_DIR, otherwise it will
assume it's in the standard compiler include path somehow (which on
Linux will include /usr/include).
What about MSVC? MSVC has an option to add directories into the
compiler's include path. I could ask them to put that there, but one
person in a chat channel said they wouldn't like that. Well I'm sure
they wouldn't like me copying mini-boost to their VC\include so I'm not
sure what to ask of them.
If I don't copy files into VC\include or have them add the Boost to
their path in non-project options, the only other solution I have is to
make some sort of script system to replace the path with Boost in all of
my 20 or so vcproj files for both debug and release modes, something I
REALLY do not want to do, partly because I see it as a hack, and partly
because it would just screw up my CVS having non-workable MSVC project
files around.
Here is ideally what I want: My boost is simple boost 1.30 unmodifed
whatsoever but just the headers I need. If they don't have Boost at all
and don't care about using Boost directly they can install my 100k or so
mini-Boost files.
If they are willing to download a 10 meg Boost lib, or have the full
Boost, I would like them to use that. My Boost is entirely unmodified
and since my lib is open source I encourage them to compile my lib with
the latest versions of the dependencies. I'd love nothing more than to
see people willing to download the 10meg Boost for my 300k library and
delete my mini-Boost.
Thanks for your comments thus far, they have been the most helpful of
any forum and chat channel so far.
Jason Winnebeck
