I’m implementing on some C++ code that I would like to make as portable as possible. I would like to avoid dependencies on libraries that require root access to install. Further, I’d prefer to avoid keeping copies of large libraries in my repository, and I would also prefer not to do user-level installations of libraries (simply because I’d have to manually install them on multiple computers.)
I would like to use the normal_distribution functionality from Boost in my project. I understand that the typical way to install Boost requires a sudo apt-get or sudo yum type of command, but I don’t have root access on the systems where this code will run. To get around this, I’m wondering if I could simply place a copy of Boost’s normal_distribution.cpp and normal_distribution.hpp in my code directory and compile/link my code with these files. Would this work?
Readers may wonder why I’m not just using the normal_distribution implementation in TR1 or C++11. The answer is that I need to maintain compatibility with some university-managed clusters that still run g++ 4.1.x, which (at least in my experience) doesn’t support <TR1/random>.
I imagine that BCP (Boost Copy) was written precisely with your situation in mind.