Re: [boost] Can we create boost-config

On 9/6/21 2:41 PM, Дмитрий Архипов via Boost wrote:

пн, 6 сент. 2021 г., 14:03 Sreeraj K via Boost :

...

*[I initialially raised this question in https://github.com/boostorg/boost/issues/548 https://github.com/boostorg/boost/issues/548, but @mclaw recommended this mailing list.]*

Similar to many other packages (eg: curl, krb5, pcre, xml2, xslt etc..), can we also ship boost-config that would provide the installation options ?

We can probably start with something like this ?

$ /usr/bin/boost-config --help Usage: boost-config [ options ]

Options: --cflags print compiler options --ldflags print linker options --prefix print the boost prefix --version print the boost version --help print this usage summary

$ /usr/bin/boost-config --version 1.66.0 $ /usr/bin/boost-config --cflags -I/usr/include $ /usr/bin/boost-config --ldflags -L/usr/lib64 -Wl,-R/usr/lib64

This sounds like a pkg-config package. In fact, several projects moved from

such custom scripts to pkg-config.

Anyway, the main problem here is to make the build system (b2) output those

flags in a parseable manner. If that was implemented, it could be used to

make pkg-config packages, CMake config modules, etc.

Another problem is that different boost libraries will require different

build flags to use them, so you'll actually need e.g. boost-thread-config,

boost-filesystem-config (or boost-thread.pc and boost-filesystem.pc if

pkg-config is used).

I agree that pkg-config is the right way. I believe, we're already producing CMake scripts for aiding find_package, but that is limited to CMake usage. There's this old ticket: https://svn.boost.org/trac10/ticket/1094 I'm not sure if there was any real progress since then.