[pkg-boost-devel] Symlinks to libraries

[Phil Endecott]

Dear Debian Boost Experts,

I'm the author of a couple of free applications that use Boost.  I'm a 
Debian user, but the apps are used by people running various other 
Linux distributions or other OSes, and they seem to suffer from quite 
frequent installation difficulties.

One of the issues is symlinks to the Boost libraries.  On my machine, I have:

$ ls -log libboost_thread*
-rw-r--r--  1 69304 Mar 22 17:09 libboost_thread-gcc-mt-1_33_1.a
lrwxrwxrwx  1    39 Apr  3 22:27 libboost_thread-gcc-mt-1_33_1.so -> libboost_thread-gcc-mt-1_33_1.so.1.33.1
-rw-r--r--  1 43272 Mar 22 17:09 libboost_thread-gcc-mt-1_33_1.so.1.33.1
lrwxrwxrwx  1    31 Apr  3 22:27 libboost_thread.a -> libboost_thread-gcc-mt-1_33_1.a
lrwxrwxrwx  1    32 Apr  3 22:27 libboost_thread.so -> libboost_thread-gcc-mt-1_33_1.so

So I can use "-lboost_thread" on the g++ command line.  But it seems 
that other distributions, and users who have installed Boost from 
source, don't get this, and need to link explicitly with 
"-lboost_thread-gcc-mt-1_33_1".  How do I generate that string?  I can 
probably guess the "gcc" bit, and as it happens my code does need >= 
1.33, but I don't care whether the user has _0 or _1 or _2.

I'm curious to know if you have any background information about why it 
is like this, and how others have solved the problem.  I note there is 
a bug report requesting a pkgconfig for Boost.  This would certainly 
help, if it was used by multiple distributions.

Regards,

Phil.