On Sat, 15 Sep 2018 at 10:11, mike via Boost
I'm pretty sure the desire of the steering committee, many users and probably A lot of boost maintainers is that b2 gets completely replaced by a cmake based solution someday (e.g. in the form of BCM).
Unless you poll the community the "pretty sureness" has no connection to the reality. I am a user and developer quite heavily sold to CMake I use CMake for Boost development. I would like to see CMake accepted as officially offered and supported build configuration. But, I do not expect CMake to replace Boost.Build. Despite that I quite often suffer from motion sickness when I have to write a non-trivial Jamfile script, I consider Boost.Build an excellent build system and I do rely on Boost.Build for Boost development developing and testing. <my-view-at-ideal-world> I would like to see - CMake and Boost.Build first class citizen build systems in Boost - each maintained by dedicated team devoted to one or the other - non-competing, but complementing Next, all references to Boost.Build and Jamfiles wiped out from the library requirements [1]. Instead, the whole community of Boost maintainers and teams of the respectful build configurations (ie. CMake and Boost.Build) should offer library author(s) any help required to integrate the libraries into the officially supported build systems. Build configurations are there as common layers glueing Boost libraires for practical convenience in development and usage, and they should be common collaborative responsibility. </my-view-at-ideal-world> FWIW, since substantial concern of library reviews are C++ code and documentation, only, lack of Jamfile-s is not a stopper preventing successful acceptance into Boost! The requirements [1] clearly states the build integration happens *after* the fact: "Once a library is accepted as part of the Boost C++ Libraries it is required that it integrate properly into the development, testing, documentation, and release processes." Then, Jamfile 'transitively' required via the testing policy [2] "A Jamfile to drive the regression tests for the library" The Boost.Build-related requirements for testing policy were established in times when no Travis CI/AppVeyor/CircleC/Azure Pipelines existed, but Boost heavily relied on in-house regression tests waterfall. Now, perhaps the requirement can shift the weight towards the CI services, make the Jamfile optional and participation in the Boost regression tests waterfall complementary. However, an update to the policies and requirements will be necessary in order to make CMake (or any other new build system) officially supported. [1] https://www.boost.org/development/requirements.html [2] https://www.boost.org/development/test.html Best regards, -- Mateusz Loskot, http://mateusz.loskot.net