[boost] Boost CMake support - Request for Comment

-----Original Message----- From: Boost On Behalf Of Robert Ramey via Boost Sent: Monday, October 1, 2018 7:07 PM

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a) A discussion on the boost developers mailing list with the goal of reaching a consensus as to what benefits CMake can and should provide to users and developers of Boost. This effort will commence with the posting of this notice. I hope that this discussion can be more or less resolved within 30 days.

Personally, I hope to gain two things by this effort: 1) I would like to be able to clone the boost super project and/or individual boost libraries into a subfolder of my cmake based app and use those libraries along the lines of - add_subdirectory( libs/boost ) // assuming the super projects resides in \ (/libs/boost) - target_link_libraries( my_app PRIVATE Boost::static_assert Boost::filesystem Boost::circular_buffer ) Which should make sure that a) All used boost libraries are built with the compiler flags specified in my cmake toolchain file, or the top level CMakeLists.txt file from my app project. (In particular c++ version and anything that influences ABI/API) b) Headers are found at their original location without any need to copy them to some installation/staging directory c) (Which is probably the same as b)) My IDE (that understands CMake files) should be able to find and parse the source and header files (e.g. for "go to definition" operations) 2) It should be possible to compile and install a boost release via the customary - cmake <path to boost_root> \ -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=<path> \ -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=<path> \ [other options] - cmake --build . - cmake --build . --target install Again respecting all compilation flags specified in the toolchain file and installing a) headers, b) compiled libraries c) the respective library cmake config files. The goal is to provide a cmake based installation procedure that can be easily used by package managers like conan, vcpkg, apt, cget and so on. In addition to those points, it would probably be prudent to also allow tests (for a individual library as well as the whole boost release) to be run via cmake / ctest and cdash, but this is less important for me as a user and I have no opinions on the details of that. Best Mike