on Thu Jan 15 2009, "Beman Dawes" <bdawes-AT-acm.org> wrote:
>> Have you tried helping a Boost newbie go through the process of >> building and installing Boost lately? It's extremely painful, but we >> don't see that pain because we've all gone through the initial hurdles >> of getting bjam setup just right for our own configurations. > > I certainly see the pain - I'm the one who does the builds for a > client of mine. It is a painful mess now, that's for sure. > > Any progress on pre-built binaries? Boostpro Computing provides them for Windows. We've just done the extra work necessary to make it fairly easy to push out a new release, and we're expecting to post a 1.37 release in the next 24 hours. >> That's the wrong thing to optimize: we need to optimize for the case >> where a new user downloads Boost and wants to build/use it >> immediately. Those users only care about a single compiler---the one >> they use for their day-to-day work---and would greatly benefit from >> being able to use their platform-specific tools (Visual Studio, >> xCode, whatever). > > True, but they have to build several variants for that compiler, and > on some platforms the 32 and 64 bit flavors are more like two separate > compilers. I think the number of actual end-users who need to build multiple variants is relatively small. Even if a company is shipping multiple versions of a product, end users are typically doing the compile-edit-debug cycle with a single compiler and variant. >> If we're going to go through the effort of introducing a new build >> system, we need to focus on the user experience first and foremost. > > If you don't give the developers tools they can use, they won't switch > to CMake. > > If you don't give the release managers tools they can use, they won't > switch to CMake. > > And of course the users needs have to be met too. > > It is a three-legged stool. All three legs have to bear the weight, or > it topples. Good. Maybe you could be explicit about the needs that, in your view, are brought by each group? -- Dave Abrahams BoostPro Computing http://www.boostpro.com _______________________________________________ Boost-cmake mailing list Boost-cmake@lists.boost.org http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost-cmake