Boost

Boost is provided by your system or the IceCube CVMFS repository. Our current minimum required version is boost-1.57.0. This version will be used by default.

Warning

You have to delete your CMakeCache.txt if you want to switch versions in a configured workspace. The include/library paths are not reset if BOOST_VERSION is changed.

boost python bindings library

Currently, boost_python libraries are automatically built against the system python. No special instructions are needed.

There is a history of missteps regarding this library and the toolset. We appear to have converged on a good solution. That history is, in chronological order:

  1. Python (2.3.5) was in the toolset, and the boost_python library was built by the boost port against this python. I don’t recall at this point why we put python in the toolset.

  2. We discovered that having python in the toolset was a huge hassle: it was hard to install other python packages into this toolset python, and it was very easy to use the wrong interpreter. This got you errors about mismatching python ABIs and/or runtime link errors. You had to distribute the entire python out to cluster nodes when doing mass processing.

    So we took python out of the toolset, or rather, the cmake build ignored the python in the toolset. This also means our boost_python library had to be built by the metaproject itself (you can’t use boost_python built against a toolset python 2.3.5 if the metaproject is building against a system python 2.4.2)

    We created a project ‘boost’ which contained code to boost_python (it got a few more libraries that needed patching as well), and boost_python was built along with the rest of the metaproject, against the system python.

    At this point cmake also created a link:

    $I3_BUILD/bin/python -> /usr/bin/python

    So that if you still had a toolset with python 2.3.5 in it, your shell wouldn’t catch that one and screw things up.

    This is the final state for boost-1.33.1. You could move the build of boost_python back into the toolset but we don’t have anybody to do the necessary hand-holding.

  3. As of boost-1.38.0, boost_python is built by the toolset against the system python and the project ‘boost’ is no longer needed or supplied.