Why the dependency manager???
Because:
- It's hard to maintain, especially when the project goes large.
- I'm personally, prefer don't repeat myself (see DRY) and re-use binary whenever possible.
I try to use conan.io for this.
- It quite easy to switch between Boost versions on any platform.
- And even do this automatically on CI/CD servers.
Usage example
- Intrusive way.
We inject generated by Conan settings into CMakeLists.txt by editing it (ref. to include ).
$ cd boost.log.intrusive; mkdir build; cd build
$ conan install .. --build missing
$ cmake ..
$ cmake --build .We all set.
- Non-intrusive or less intrusive way.
We already have our CMakeLists.txt file with a lot of find_packages(...) in it.
How to tell CMake to use Conan's binary packages?
Inject search paths using CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE.
$ cd boost.log.nonintrusive; mkdir build; cd build
$ conan install .. --build missing
$ cmake .. -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=conan_paths.cmake
$ cmake --build .We all set.
NOTE:
I'm not sure if it correct, because I, sometimes, check for CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE variable to detect if I'm in cross-compilation mode.
To avoid TOOLCHAIN_FILE usage, a perhaps better way to provide conan_paths.cmake's variables through the command line.
for example
$ cmake .. -D<BOOST_ROOT>=<path to dependency> [-D...]etc.- include conan_paths.cmake on top of your CMakeLists.txt (intrusive, but less changes in find_packages).