Re: [boost] What would make tool authors happier..

3 Jun 2015

      I frankly don't understand why this is so hard.

Shouldn't the build/test of all of boost just be the sequence of 
buid/test of each library?

In a short time I following proof of concept:

# Bash shell script - run from boost root

# set debug output
#set -x

# set extended globs
shopt -s extglob
# expand null files lists to ... null file lists
shopt -s nullglob

function walk_subdirectories () {
     for dir in */
     do
         # drop into the directory
         cd $dir >/dev/null
         #if it's  the subdirectory that interests us
         if test ${dir%/} = "$1"
         then
             # invoke the requested command inside the directory
             echo $PWD
             echo $2
         else
             # check subdirectories
             walk_subdirectories "$1" "$2"
         fi
         cd ..
     done
}

Then I can run all the library build/tests with:
. build.sh

then

cd libs
walk_subdirectories test 'echo b2 ...'
cd ..

Or if I want to create test tables for all the libraries I can use

cd libs
walk_subdirectories test 'echo library_status ...'
cd ..

Of if I want to invoke the build test for the libraries which support 
CMake I can

cd libs
walk_subdirectories CMake 'echo b2 ...'
cd ..

Of course to build all the tools I'd just move to another dirctory.

etc.

Note that this already handles the multi-level libraries.  Also I 
realize that it fails to include boost test because of a naming conflict 
so let's not start spitballing this on this basis.  Also note that is 
this trivial to debug and fix by anyone if something fails.  The same 
can't be said for other boost tools.

I realize that one might not want to use shell scripts - though they 
work pretty well here.  If you're building this with C++ or bjam or 
whatever, it shouldn't be that much more complicated than this.  I can't 
help but believe that all our build/test/release stuff is over engineered.

Robert Ramey