Consider Gradle as Boost.Build Replacement

[Pepper Lebeck-Jobe]

My name is Pepper Lebeck-Jobe, and I’m the lead of the native team at Gradle. I’m contacting the steering committee regarding the recent announcement by Jon Kalb of the desire to migrate the Boost C++ Libraries build system to CMake. We would love to conduct a short, 30-minute, meeting with key developers to better understand your goals around automation and understand if Gradle may be an even more compelling a choice than CMake for the future of Boost.

We helped several clients migrate their native builds from a wide variety of build tools, including CMake, to Gradle. All achieved great results, and we would like to help Boost in a similar way. Gradle aims at not only improving build happiness but also at improving testing, packaging, and publishing of generated artifacts.

Who would be the right person or people to have this short meeting with?

Kind regards,

Pepper Lebeck-Jobe

[David Sankel]

Hi Pepper,

I can't speak for the steering committee, but the primary reason for switching to CMake was its popularity, not that Boost.Build had any defect in functionality. I haven't heard of Gradle being in use for C++ before you mentioned it, so it doesn't really live in the space of alternatives we were considering.

Now if Gradle grows to a point to where it is nearly as popular as CMake for C++, then I think it could be a possibility.

-- David

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[Pepper Lebeck-Jobe]

David,

Thanks for helping me understand the steering committee's evaluation process. It is definitely true that CMake is the more popular tool in the native development space (for now.) Anecdotally, we've had several engagements with clients who have chosen to use Gradle instead of CMake because of its stronger modeling and better extensibility.

I'd love to have a quick chat even if you're 100% sure that CMake is the right decision for the Boost community at this point. It would be great to gather some information from you which could help guide our feature-prioritization efforts and ensure that we are exceeding the needs and desires of all native developers.

Thanks,

Pepper

On Sunday, August 13, 2017 at 7:08:38 PM UTC+2, David Sankel wrote:

Hi Pepper,

I can't speak for the steering committee, but the primary reason for switching to CMake was its popularity, not that Boost.Build had any defect in functionality. I haven't heard of Gradle being in use for C++ before you mentioned it, so it doesn't really live in the space of alternatives we were considering.

Now if Gradle grows to a point to where it is nearly as popular as CMake for C++, then I think it could be a possibility.

-- David

On Thu, Aug 10, 2017 at 11:10 AM, Pepper Lebeck-Jobe <pep...@gradle.com> wrote:

My name is Pepper Lebeck-Jobe, and I’m the lead of the native team at Gradle. I’m contacting the steering committee regarding the recent announcement by Jon Kalb of the desire to migrate the Boost C++ Libraries build system to CMake. We would love to conduct a short, 30-minute, meeting with key developers to better understand your goals around automation and understand if Gradle may be an even more compelling a choice than CMake for the future of Boost.

We helped several clients migrate their native builds from a wide variety of build tools, including CMake, to Gradle. All achieved great results, and we would like to help Boost in a similar way. Gradle aims at not only improving build happiness but also at improving testing, packaging, and publishing of generated artifacts.

Who would be the right person or people to have this short meeting with?

Kind regards,

Pepper Lebeck-Jobe

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The Boost Steering Committee webpage: https://sites.google.com/a/boost.org/steering/
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[Rob Stewart]

The only way forward I can imagine is to participate in the developers' mailing list to determine the requirements then bring a working replacement for the existing build system. You might find some others willing to help, as with the CMake effort, or you might need to do it on your own.

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[Pepper Lebeck-Jobe]

Thanks for the response Rob.

That is more of a commitment than Gradle is ready to make at this point. We can revisit this opportunity in the future. Maybe we'll find someone in the community who wants to champion the improvement once Gradle is more popular.

Thanks for taking the time to respond,

Pepper