[build2] create packages invoking 3rdparty build systems

[Boris Kolpackov]

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

> once again - are there any news about creating bpkg packages using
> other build systems?
> 
> I am looking for a cpp package manager to improve the dependency
> management in my company. Our software relies on various open
> source and closed source 3rdpary projects (e.g. boost, ffmpeg,
> jsoncpp, ...). Unfortunately, we do not not have the man-power
> to rewrite and maintain our own build system for those project.
> Thus, the only possibility is to write an interface for building
> this projects.

While I don't deny this is a real problem, I still don't believe
trying to support other build systems is the solution. We just
won't be able to provide the same functionality, consistency,
and robustness as we do with build2. While it could be easier
and faster to get something going early on, in the long run
this will have detrimental effect since now instead of porting
projects to build2 we will be wasting our effort fixing unreliable
integrations with other build systems.

What we do plan to support is integration with the system package
managers (deb, rpm, etc) so that you will be able to automatically
fall-back to system-installed packages. In fact, you can already
tell bpkg that a package comes from the system, there is just no
automatic installation of such system packages.

Would this functionality help in your case?

Thanks,
Boris