[ET Trac] #1775: Add Boost to ET

[tootle]

#1775: Add Boost to ET

 Reporter: Erik Schnetter
   Status: new
Milestone: 
  Version: development version
     Type: enhancement
 Priority: minor
Component: EinsteinToolkit thorn

Comment (by tootle):

For my 2cents, I think it is an excellent idea to add a thorn that can detect boost libraries, but I think having to include the ability to build the whole library is too much bloat not to mention compile time.  The number of dependencies that boost has in order to build the full suite is incredibly large - run spack concretize for a full boost spec and you’ll see what I mean.  Even on our cluster, boost alone can take 30\+ minutes to compile the full suite including dependencies. 

I understand this goes against the ETK paradigm of everything that is needed is included, which should definitely be the case for fundamental components such as Carpet \(glad to hear CarpetX will remove the boost dependency\), but I think it would be more useful to fail gracefully and list the Thorns that depend on boost rather than defaulting to building the entire suite.  Also, for modern clusters boost is usually available by default, but the environments may not be updated correctly making automated searches like those in Radice’s boost not robust.  Cmake has incredibly good features for finding boost as well as individual components, but this still depends on the environment correctly setting \`BOOST\_ROOT\`.

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Ticket URL: https://bitbucket.org/einsteintoolkit/tickets/issues/1775/add-boost-to-et
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