Our specific requirement is to statically link _our_ preferred version of zlib built from _our_ pristine (and possibly patched) repo.
As I said, this is accomplished by putting the following line in one of the b2 configuration files, for example user-config.jam:
using zlib : 1.3.1 : <include>/opt/zlib-1.3.1/include <search>/opt/zlib-1.3.1/lib <name>our-zlib-name-1.3.1 ;
Peter, Thanks for the information and encouragement. Your name is all over the cmake infrastructure, and I would like to thank you (collectively) for how nice it all is. I'm not a huge fan of cmake, but I accept that it's the go-to for C++ building, generally speaking. Some familiarity can go a long way. This is looking like a great fit for what we want to do - essentially statically link everything from our own repos of everything from the ground up - both Windows and Linux. I will also follow up to respond to some of the points about boost-bundling of these building-block compression libraries. I admit that OpenSSL is a bigger kettle of fish than say zlib or zstd. Thanks! - Nigel Stewart