My advice about build tooling is to use buck (from Facebook) or bazel (from Google). If you have an ex-Googler nearby, use Bazel. If you have an ex-Facebooker nearby, use buck. Otherwise flip a coin.
Buck and Bazel were created for complex internal dependencies.
You'll have just as easy/hard of a time getting Boost installed with Bazel as you would for Make.
Or publishing an accessible library that depends on Boost.
I also use boost when the compiler is behind (e.g. boost::variant until apple's compiler caught up).
I can't wait to have a boost-free tree. but I suspect it will be a while.
> Or publishing an accessible library that depends on Boost.
This is patently false. Here is the bazel dependency for boost (put this in your workspace file):
git_repository(
name = "com_github_nelhage_rules_boost",
commit = "6d6fd834281cb8f8e758dd9ad76df86304bf1869",
shallow_since = "1543903644 -0800",
remote = "https://github.com/nelhage/rules_boost",
)
load("@com_github_nelhage_rules_boost//:boost/boost.bzl", "boost_deps")
boost_deps()
Bazel does have a dependency ecosystem, it's based off of hashed versions of publicly available git repos and http archives (and anything else you want really). Which means any code anywhere can be a dependency while still being reproducible. Additionally you can provide local build instructions for the external code, so you don't even need to rely on their build. The better way is to find someone who maintains a BUILD file for a repo (or mirror and maintain it yourself) but still.
To beetwenty's point, the C++ ecosystem in general lacks the the level of support for dependency ecosystems that you find in Maven, pip, gem, npm, etc.
Bazel external dependencies are in fact a real pain point. See the 3+ year old Bazel Recursive WORKSPACE proposal. [1]
I was at the first Bazel Conf in 2017, and the external dependencies meeting was quite the row.
[1] https://bazel.build/designs/2016/09/19/recursive-ws-parsing....
Also as demonstrated Boost is way easier to include in bazel than make which was the original issue under discussion.
I make a library that depends on boost, here is how you use it:
git_repository(
name="foo"
...
)
load("@foo//:foo/foo.bzl", "foo_deps")
foo_deps()
So, bringing such multiple third party bandaid is currently not such a great idea. It would be a bit better if boost itself provided it.
How is this different than most other build systems? You always have to rely on others.