Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Dirk Zimoch <[email protected]> · Mon, 11 Dec 2017 09:19:26 +0100

On 08.12.2017 21:43, Andrew Johnson wrote:

Hi Dirk,

On 12/06/2017 02:37 AM, Dirk Zimoch wrote:

I have an embedded Linux architecture with gcc 3.4.3 and without boost.
I was thinking about using the boost files that come with EPICS 7. Now I
wonder why they are under include/os/vxWorks? VxWorks is not necessarily
the only target OS without boost (or C++11).

VxWorks was the only OS that any of the core developers at the time
cared about which needed Boost adding. We don't have time to do stuff
that might never be needed, and there *is* a problem with having
multiple versions of Boost in use in the same executable, so we removed
the Boost files for Linux in order to avoid clashes [consider linking
EPICS code that was build using our version of Boost with a non-EPICS
library that was built using a system-provided Boost].

I found some of the difficulties when trying it. :-)

I can try to modify the configuration for that specific target to use
the files from include/os/vxWorks/boost, but shouldn't we try to move
the boost installation somewhere else?

Setting up Boost for VxWorks and EPICS cross-builds is probably somewhat
complicated (I've only ever used it with pvCommonCPP) which is why we
include it. We already moved the minimal subset of Boost needed for
VxWorks into libCom (pvCommonCPP contained the whole of Boost, which is
huge).

You can propose changes/additions for other targets and we'll be happy
to discuss them, but it would be better if you can just install Boost
natively on that OS. We aren't going to support older OS architectures
forever (you would also have to do most of the grunt-work).

I will try to install Boost natively now.

Dirk

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System