Python for system administrators (developerWorks)

Posted Sep 9, 2007 16:55 UTC (Sun) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861)
In reply to: Python for system administrators (developerWorks) by gravious
Parent article: Python for system administrators (developerWorks)

Yes, and Boost isn't available in our environment. That's a good suggestion, though: Boost has some great stuff in it. I would love Boost much more if it were autotooled (and I don't mean just a small "configure" wrapper on the outside). I know many people don't like autoconf etc., and I don't want to argue about that, but the Boost build environment is (was) a huge pain. Our environment is embedded and so we have to do cross-compilation and get output for lots of different targets, and the last time I tried to integrate Boost into this (admittedly this was 3 years or so ago) it was extremely difficult. If Boost were based on make then at least we could easily override the compiler, etc. settings from the command line but doing that with Boost's customized version of "jam" seems annoyingly difficult.

Autoconf/automake/libtool are baroque but they are founded on a lot of hard-won, difficult to come by knowledge about different types of user environments, including building for many targets from the same source, cross-compilation, building outside of the tree (from read-only source trees), etc. that, for the end user, mean so much.

Python for system administrators (developerWorks)

Posted Sep 10, 2007 1:44 UTC (Mon) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (1 responses)

I agree 100%, trying to build Boost is utter torture. I tried to write robust deploy scripts for vertical apps that link against Boost and mostly failed.

Happily, though, everything my apps needed was header-only. With only minor tweaks, I deployed the apps without actually building Boost!

So, definitely try #including the Boost files you're interested in, but don't link against any Boost libs. There's a very good chance that this will work.

Regexes are a notable exception -- you definitely need to build the libraries for those.

Python for system administrators (developerWorks)

Posted Sep 19, 2007 20:11 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I managed it. It took a couple of hundred lines of patches just to
reliably set the CFLAGS, LDFLAGS, and install prefix.

Compared to autoconf or cmake, that's crazy.

Python for system administrators (developerWorks)

Posted Sep 19, 2007 13:54 UTC (Wed) by gravious (guest, #7662) [Link]

Thanks for the heads up you Mad Scientist you, I was curious - consider my curiosity sated. You're basically saying your non-use is a function of Boost's build system in general and not the quality of the Boost.Regex code in particular.