Install the Boost Graph Library under the Alien namespace

[duffee]

Will this solve all our problems?

[thibaultduponchelle]

Hello,

I wrote Alien::Boost CPAN module, if you need me to update this Alien, do not hesitate.

Since I'm the only user of this, I do not added other -l as I auto reported 😀 in https://github.com/thibaultduponchelle/Alien-Boost/issues/1
I currently only expose boost_program_options (stupidly easy to change to add others)
I only test boost_program_options (changing this requires more effort since there is several libs and I have to find how to test them)

Alien is perfect for compiling/installing system deps like this, see alienfile.org and irc://irc.perl.org/#native for kind help.

It brings several smart helpers (download, gathering flags), maintains your deps up to date (my Alien::Boost should have switched automatically on 1.75.0) and brings some portability (but won't be able to fix magically all portability problems).

The whole Boost is an extreme use of "Alien framework", since it is not easy to compile and it is so big that it can just timeout or make CPAN testers "out of memory" 😆 so I can't even target good CPANTesters results.
It's also C++ that made me do this hack (can't remember the exact details maybe it's related to static compilation 😀)

And you can't count on me to support alone something else than Unix like things (even if I would I don't have what is needed to test) and as you can see I disabled it

I say alone since we can imagine sharing the maintainership of this... 😃

You have also the option to create a Alien::Boost::Graph that only retrieves and compiles what you need. Easier, smaller, but does not cover possible needs of other Perl programmers.

[thibaultduponchelle]

Since I posted here, I noticed that you only use headers from Boost.Graph

I uploaded Alien::Boost::Headers that installs (or wrap) Boost headers only.

If you are interested to go this path, I think #11 is a good start 😃

[duffee]

Hi @thibaultduponchelle
Thank you for saving me a lot of work.

I've finally had a look at your (withdrawn) PR and it works for me (Fedora 39, gcc 13.3.1) on the without_fpermissive branch. It builds successfully by hand (i.e. without Alien::Boost::Headers) with Boost v1.66.0, v1.81.0 and v1.87.0 and I do have a separate branch for v1.33.1 (which is 20 years old).

Maybe I just need to reason this out loud.
Should Alien::Boost::Headers be listed in the new cpanfile? (it is now) If the Boost headers are already installed, we still need Alien::Boost::Headers to tell perl where they are. If the headers are not installed A::B::H will download the latest version for us. Where did they install? I installed A::B::H with cpanm -l local and now I'm curious where they are in case I want to remove them to try out a different version of Boost.

I will take me 3-6 months to get around to trying a Windows install. If that works out, I'll share maintenance duties with you for that platform.