Shall the stub library libboost_system.so be removed now ?

[Romain-Geissler-1A]

Hi,

Following the issue boostorg/filesystem#336 on Boost.Filesystem side, I was wondering: does it still make sense in 2025 that Boost.System ships a stub linkable library while it has been header-only for years now ? Shouldn't we delete this compatibility layer now ?

Cheers,
Romain

[pdimov]

Good point. It didn't do any harm before, but now that we have the modular build.jam, we should probably make it header-only in b2 as well.

[pdimov]

Done on develop.

[Romain-Geissler-1A]

Thanks, it seems to work when applied to the Boost 1.88 release.

I have also opened a similar request for Boost.Regex in boostorg/regex#253

[pdimov]

DateTime is header-only as well nowadays. But we haven't applied the modular PR there yet.

[mvieth]

Hello, is it expected and intended behaviour that the file boost_system-config.cmake is now not installed any more? Up until Boost 1.88.0 it was available. Is there a recommended way to find out whether boost_system is installed, i.e. whether the boost system headers are available (in CMakeLists.txt)?

[pdimov]

Easiest would be to just drop system from the COMPONENTS as it's not needed since 1.69. (I assume your CML has something like find_package(Boost COMPONENTS system foo bar).)

If you care about Boost releases earlier than 1.69, you can use OPTIONAL COMPONENTS system, but I hope you don't. :-)