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Re: Boost headers, again

 

Dick Hollenbeck wrote:
Richard A Burton wrote:

2009/9/28 Dick Hollenbeck <dick@...>


I volunteer to do this and clean up the entire boost mess during the
next two weeks if there are no objections.


One question - How version specific are the boost headers? If a
particular version of headers are included will that prevent it being
compiled on a system with a different level installed. I guess on
windows this isn't likely to be a problem because chances are people
won't have it installed, but on linux people may well have (or may
want to) just install their distro's libboost-dev package which
probably won't be the same level as the headers included with kicad.

Richard.



I would hope I can make the <kicad>/include/boost directory have higher search priority than the system one.

If that can be achieved, then the compiler will not need to look for the system installed headers, and won't.

With C++ templates, the term "library" is no longer unambiguous. Because we can have header libraries consisting of C++ templates, we can have classical *.a or *.so or *.lib files, and we can have combos of all the above.

So I will refer to "binary libraries" and "header libraries" to differentiate:


It is my understanding that the boost headers that we are using, do not need any supporting binary libraries or object files. They simply tell the compiler to generate the necessary code on top of the standard C++ library. So even if a user has the boost binary (non-header) libraries installed, this will have no effect, since we do not use them. And this is what I have been saying. We only use the headers, and folks who have been compiling boost binary libraries (or installing them) have been doing so unnecessarily.


Dick








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