4- It is in fact - I believe - possible to do a "cd doc; make" with CMake, but not from the source tree,
<snip> I believe that thatis what've done with the safe numerics library.
So what I do now is also that: I am maintaining my CMakeLists.txt, for the purpose of having a proper development environment, but it has no other purpose at all. Also I have to say that it does not work well with this horrible "b2 header": in my cmake, I am hitting the headers of the library (in libX/include), and not of the main superproject. My IDE shows me 2 different files because of that.
I don't have this problem - I just use the cmake command - include directory to refer to the include files of the library I'm working on. As far as CMake is concerned, the superproject doesn't exist. When I switch to boost build to run comprehensive tests while I take 10 hours off to catchup on my sleep - it creates the headers it needs I think automatically. Or maybe I run b2 headers before I launch it. Now I don't remember.
I do not like the current state of b2 for many reasons (even though I think it could be really a good build system), but CMake is not covering many features that are currently required by the boost superproject. Until the point where we can consistently build the lib (including the possibly many flavor of the same library - STATIC/SHARED at the same time, etc),run the tests, and generate the documentation (including the possibility to have the boostdoc/quickbook/doxygen toolchain),
I should say that my boost build does all those things. My complaint is that: a) It's harder to setup than I would hope it to be. b) Once set up, it's pretty reliable. But when it breaks it's an easter egg hunt to make it work again.
I do not see any *good* reason to move to cmake.
I'm not proposing abandoning support for CMake. I'm proposing that we officially tolerate the existence of CMake files in boost projects - perhaps with some restrictions.
I have to say this does not scale at all, especially wrt. <snip>
I think that boost works better as a "federation" rather than a "republic". Our loose rules have permitted things like quickbook to be born in the first place. We'll never agree on certain things: a) this topic b) a documentation system c) other stuff. We just keep moving on. Robert Ramey