thanks to some helpful subscriber of this list, I figured out how to tell the Boost Build System where my Python is: I thus initiated the build by calling

jam -sPYTHON_ROOT=/usr/local/python -sPYTHON_VERSION=2.2 \ -sBOOST_ROOT=/home/simons/projects/boost-current -sTOOLS=gcc

but I am still getting lots of errors when trying to compile the latest version. A complete log of the failing build is available at

http://cryp.to/boost-build-log.txt

for anyone concerned. I'd appreciate any help on getting these errors fixed!

Ok, the linker errors indicate that you need to add -lrt to the libraries linked to for multithreaded builds, I'll get that fixed in the gcc toolset description. There are then a large number of apparent failures arising from the link-fail tests - these tests are actually passing (those files aren't supposed to compile and link), but the jam build system is getting a little confused by them - if you run jam again you shouldn't see failures related to those tests again - because they are actually "up to date" now. Finally there are some tests failing because NDEBUG is defined - currently those test cases can only be built in debug mode so that assert actually does something. However this is another issue we need to fix. regards, John Maddock http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/john_maddock/index.htm