Re: [boost] CMake Announcement from Boost Steering Committee

On 7/27/2017 2:42 PM, Gary Furnish via Boost wrote:

On Thu, Jul 27, 2017 at 10:30 AM, Edward Diener via Boost wrote:

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On 7/27/2017 11:28 AM, Gary Furnish via Boost wrote:

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On Thu, Jul 27, 2017 at 8:40 AM, Rene Rivera via Boost wrote:

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Since you are making a variety of accusations..

On Wed, Jul 26, 2017 at 11:01 PM, Gary Furnish via Boost < boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:

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I've observed from the outside that basically no one was ever going to touch boost.build because the people who like it (who happen to be single points of failure for the entire boost ecosystem) basically out-shouted everyone whenever a technical discussion came up.

Prove it.

Sure. See the discussions where if you aren't doing things the boost-build way and are instead a config-per-directory way your basically considered a second class citizen in spite of that being the way the rest of the oss world works.

Please give a URL to these discussions you are citing. Granted that Boost Build creates output in a different structure than CMake does, where you get the rest of your complaint I do not know.

I don't have a specific discussion so much as the feeling that in discussions leading up to the SC there was a very us against them mentality on the part of people who like boost.build. Its not a very welcoming place to comment as a user/minor bug fix contributor.

It is very hard to adopt a new build system when you get used to the one that exists. It is much like switching from programming from one computer language to another one. People are passionate and tempers often get high.

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The fact that it is still non-obvious how to do this without touching anything besides a build directory is awful. This should be somewhere in big bold letters.

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Its not like there haven't been concerns about boost.build for years.

All build systems, heck all software, has "concerns".

Yes but the issues that I'm talking about are things that have been an issue for years and never got fixed. See also silently dropping flags if you use a space and don't quote in bjam files (something also not obvious and yet important to pass compiler flags!). At least CMAKE/most sane build systems will put up errors somewhere along the lines.

Are these so-called issues documented anywhere in Boost Trac ? Have PRs been created for these issues ? Have these issues been discussed on the Boost mailing lists ? If so, please cite where.

I have no idea, but I know that they come up enough that build questions are pretty persistent on stack overflow compared to other c++ software in my opinion. Boost has by far the hardest to understand system as a user of anything I've dealt with, including setting up cross compiling gcc which is no picnic. I have seen the whitespace issue dismissed as intended behavior because of the way the lexer works in a thread at one point, but its an intended behavior that is very user unfriendly.

The solution is always to raise issues and if there is no response than you have a right to be ticked off. I do agree with you that for many, if not most, programmers Boost Build is arcane. But it actually works with much less amount of scripting work required than CMake does. Nonetheless I agree with the move to CMake, as much as I hope Boost Build still remains as an alternative for end-users who also like using it.

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Its not like the documentation for boost.build wasn't basically "ask the mailing list or prey someone else has asked stack overflow" for years.

The documentation is bad compared to what other documentation?

The documentation is bad compared to say, CMAKE, which isn't great in the first place.

CMake docs are just a list of various subjects without any overviews of how to use anything. I do not call that better than Boost Build, and I do not thing that Boost Build documentation is great either. Yes but plenty of people have written CMake tutorials. Boost.build not so much.

Tutorials may not be for everyone as a way of understanding the basic CMake concepts and how they relate to each other. I specifically have to understand concepts and their relationship before I even want to look at tutorials. I will almost certainly end up buying the CMake book in order to understand it.

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Setting up an out of build directory has always been a pain with poorly documented flags needing to be invoked to share a common source directory (and its worth noting that I'm not sure its technically parallel safe in any reasonable way given the need to bootstrap and create header links and what not).

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Its not like every time a new version of MSVC beta comes out boost.build doesn't break and its not a priority because the maintainers of boost.build don't use MSVC.

Prove that it wasn't a priority. Considering that the last Boost release was delayed precisely to support MSVC building.

It was delayed to support the final release. CMAKE supported it from the first beta. Given that MSVC is specifically making an effort to implement features to be part of the standards process, this is basically a choice between using boost or being on MSVC's and C++ cutting edge. Support for MSVC has basically always been this bad as far as I remember. It should have never been necessary to delay a release to support a key platform when there were four betas.

Four betas that were in constant flux but you think that it is up to Boost to constantly follow VC++'s changes as they roll out a new release over an extended time period. Boost has constantly gone out of its way to accommodate Microsoft and VC++. Any breakage that occurs is because VC++ has always been behind gcc and clang as far as C++ standards compliance. Needless to say the VC++ preprocessor has never been C++ standards compliant and lack of such things like two-phase lookup has repeatedly broken C++ standards compliance in the sort of corner cases which advanced C++ code as evidenced by Boost libraries entails. You are way out of line on this item. If you had any real knowledge of Boost library code you would know that the vast majority of one-off fixes are for the VC++ compilers. That has certainly improved with the latest VC++ release(s), but to say that Boost does not and has not gone out of its way tro accommodate VC++ is just wrong.

Honestly standards compliance errors are great, I can fix those locally. If I could persistently get to those I would be happy. What has always been a problem is when feature detection or compiler detection goes wrong, and everything blows up before I even get a chance to find real errors.

You should report these problems with [config] starting your subject as this as feature detection is the essence of the Boost config library.

This is a design flaw. If MSVC next version comes out, I should at least be able to try to build what worked last version.

I run local tests of various Boost libraries using VC++8.0 through the latest VC++14.1. I have never run into a configuration problem of which I am aware as reflected by those tests. If you have problems doing this with any Boost library you should report it.