Question

I’m new to boost, and thought I’d try it out with some realistic deployment scenarios for the .dlls, so I used the following command to compile/install the libraries:

.\bjam install --layout=system variant=debug runtime-link=shared link=shared
--with-date_time --with-thread --with-regex --with-filesystem
--includedir=<my include directory> --libdir=<my bin directory> > installlog.txt

That seemed to work, but my simple program (taken right from the “Getting Started” page) fails:

#include <boost/regex.hpp>
#include <iostream>
#include <string>

// Place your functions after this line
int main()
{
    std::string line;
    boost::regex pat( "^Subject: (Re: |Aw: )*(.*)" );

    while (std::cin)
    {
        std::getline(std::cin, line);
        boost::smatch matches;
        if (boost::regex_match(line, matches, pat))
            std::cout << matches[2] << std::endl;
    }
}

This fails with the following linker error:

fatal error LNK1104: cannot open file 'libboost_regex-vc80-mt-1_42.lib'

I’m sure that both the .lib and the .dlls are in that directory, and named how I want them to be (ie: boost_regex.lib, etc, all unversioned, as the –layout=system says). So why is it looking for the versioned type of it? And how do I get it to look for the unversioned type of the library?

I’ve tried this with more “normal” options, such as below:

.\bjam stage --build-type=complete --with-date_time --with-thread --with-filesystem --with-regex > mybuildlog.txt

And that works fine. I made sure my compiler saw the “stage\lib” directory, and it compiled and ran fine with nothing beyond having the environment looking into the right lib directory. But when I took those “testing” directories away, and wanted to use these others (unversioned), then it failed.

I’m under VS2005 here on XP. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Fast answer, for I have no access to a Visual C++ at home.

I believe you are clashing with the “autolinking” of Boost on Visual C++ compilers.

A solution would be to disable “autolink” (see your documentation for that: A quick google search showed the macro “BOOST_ALL_NO_LIB” to disable autolinking for ALL Boost libraries), and then link explicitely your project to the right library.

I’ll update this answer as soon as possible.