fail to install boost library

Question

Hi, I am installing boost library from its source boost_1_40_0.tar.bz2 on my Ubuntu 8.10. Following "./bootstrap.sh --prefix=path/to/installation/prefix" and "./bjam install", the compilation is very intensive and my system seems unable to take the burden and abnormally exits. I tried several times. All end in my system aborting. Everytime I was hoping it could go further somehow on what was left last time but it looks more like this is not the case.

So I wonder if it is also takes you much computer resources to compile the boost library (how long it takes and how much space the library will take).

What would you suggest to me to make the installation successful on my system.

Is possible to not install all the sublibraries? For example, now I am only interested in boost/statistics/accumulators. How to?

Thanks and regards!

Answer 1

I'm using --with-libraryname as bjam command-line argument to build only a part o boost. For example for my mingw compiler command line to build boost would be:

bjam toolset=gcc --with-signals --with-filesystem --with-test --with-regex --with-iostreams --with-thread --with-program_options -sBZIP2_INCLUDE=. runtime-link=static link=static threading=multi --build-type=complete stage

-s sets CPP macro definition

stage - is bjam target to build

--build-type=complete will make Boost.Build generate release and debug versions of boost libraries

There are some other obvious options too. I don't remember why link option is duplicated, though.

Answer 2

Two quick comments.

1. Whenever I wanted a newer boost on Ubuntu, I took the most current Debian (source) package and simply rebuilt it as a local .deb package.

2. I have not had a chance to look at 1.40 yet, but the statistics/accumulators have been functional for several Boost releases now. Maybe you can use libboost1.37-dev as in Ubuntu 9.04 (i.e. upgrade Ubuntu, possibly even just partially by switching to these Boost versions and their Depends:) ?

Answer 3

There is also a boost-cmake build, if you like cmake. See

http://gitorious.org/~straszheim/boost/cmake

you want the 1.40.0 branch.