Important Goals

This page documents the current goals in Boost.Build development

• Better documentation:
  • Should rewrite installation docs to clearly say three steps in installation -- getting bjam, setting bjam where's Boost.Build, and setting up user-config.jam. Then describe each step in detail.
  • Should document every feature, and every tool. We have docs for all compilers, but there are more tools than that.
  • Extender documentation should describe the design in more detail. More examples should be given.
• Better error messages. We get big stacktrace on most error, that sometimes don't mention a source line at all.
  • Should show source line for trivial syntax errors such a missign semicolon?
  • For errors during building, should show the line of Jamfile where the target currently built is declared
  • Generally should not show stacktraces unless explicitly requested by the user.
• Important issues
  • Project ids
  • MoreTransparency
  • Shorter/custom target paths
  • Feature relevance
  • CrossCompiling
  • Autoconf
  • pkgconfig, linking to installed Boost?

• Extending interface improvements. At the time, extending can be done either by rules creating new main targets, or by declaring new main target class, or by new generator class. We should push for using generator as the primary extension mechanism, and better document it. See ExtendingInterfaceImprovements.
• Change of implementation language. Using bjam core for internal and extending proves problematic. We should switch to Python.