Hi Steven,
b) in your Jamfile, attempt to auto-configure these libraries if they are not already configured.
I'm not sure what that means. A user has to point to the source code somehow. How should we do that? Using environmental variables?
It would go in user-config.jam (or site-config.jam). If the library has a standard installation location it should be found without any help from the user. There's nothing we can do on Windows, but on other platforms we can use the compiler's default search path.
OK, if you think user-config.jam is the way to go then we do it this way. Of course, I'll reflect the necessary changes in gil::io documentation. Can we just define the source code path like this, inside user-config.jam: using zlib : 1.2.5 : c:/chhenning/zlib/zlib-1.2.5 If so, how would the gil::io jam file pick up the path? As you probably can guess I'm not very familiar with configuring jam files. Any help from your side would be very appreciated.
c) in your Jamfile, test whether the libraries were successfully configured and take any appropriate action.
Again, how would you do that?
What I mean is that your code should look like:
using zlib ;
if [ zlib.configured ] { ... }
I don't know whether the existing zlib.jam supports usage like this, but I'll make sure that something like this works if you need it.
Please let me know what I have to do make it to work. Thanks, Christian