Re: [boost] Proposal for moving Boost to CMake

On Mon, 2017-06-19 at 18:43 +0200, Olaf van der Spek wrote:

On Mon, Jun 19, 2017 at 5:14 PM, P F wrote:

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On Jun 19, 2017, at 3:58 AM, Olaf van der Spek via Boost wrote:

On Sat, Jun 17, 2017 at 3:36 PM, P F via Boost wrote:

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It would be nice to not just support cmake, but pkgconfig as well. There are many times I need to use boost in non-cmake projects, so having pkgconfig would be helpful as well.

I don't really get find_package and pkgconfig etc.

I use package management to install the dependencies I need. I then include and link to the stuff I need. It'd be nice if the linking was automatic like it is on MSVC but okay.

Why does one need all kinds of extra complexity in every single make file for things like find_package or pkgconfig?

I find writing something like `g++ $(pkgconfig boost_asio --cflags —libs) foo.cpp` much easier to write. In fact, I would need some investigating to know what flags I need. Other users would like boost to support pkgconfig as well as there are tickets open for this. Almost the same applies for `find_package` in cmake as well.

`g++ foo.cpp` would be even easier.. but Linux still doesn't support auto-linking like GCC AFAIK.

Even if auto-link would work, it would fail to find the headers for user installations. I could hard-code the include path, but this makes the build not-relocatable to another machine. I could add a custom variable like `BOOST_ROOT` but this complicates the build environment.  For proprietary builds, you can get away with a lot. You can require the developers to put the dependency in a certain folder or set all these build flags.  However, for open-source it is very different because the users will be building the product as well. They may have different build envirnomnents, they may put all their dependencies in /opt/foo or they may spread it out among different folders, or they may be cross-compiling so they need to ignore the host dependencies.  Boost should definitely support these open-source workflows, as many other open-source libraries do.