[build2] 3rd party build system - stable release

[Boris Kolpackov]

Hi Thomas,

Thomas Maierbacher <maierbacher at gmit-gmbh.de> writes:

> First of all thanks for your work! I especially like the Idea to have
> a C++ package manager.

Thanks, we are glad you like it!


> According to the git repo, there seems to be a lot of development on
> this project and the last "release" was 3 months ago. Should I wait
> for the next release to come? Is there a recommended stable version
> to be used?

As you have noticed the project is under very heavy development and
it's still at the "alpha" stage. So neither the current release nor
the upcoming (planned for end-January) will be "stable" in the
interface/language stability sense. So if you want to start playing
with it, I would say grab what's currently available and go for it.


> Second: I do not want to rewrite/maintain build systems for 3rdParty
> code. Is it possible to interface 3rdparty build systems? How do I do
> that?

If you want to use other build systems to create bpkg packages, then
unfortunately, this is not supported and most likely never will. The
package manager works uniformly and reliably across all the platforms
because it can rely on the "sane" underlying build system. Achieving
the same while supporting other build systems will be non-trivial, to
say the least.

If, on the other hand, you want to use libraries/tools built with
some other build systems in project that use the build2 build system,
then this should be possible. If you are on Linux/UNIX and your third-
party projects support pkg-config, then build2 should be able to find
them automatically. Otherwise, there is always the -I/-L options that
you can pass via config.cc.poptions and config.cc.loptions.

Boris