Building boost 1.51 with MSVC for Windows with debug symbols

This post is just a quick “note to self” for future reference. We wanted to update our boost source to the latest version, so I started building it with the usual “bjam --build-type=complete debug-symbols=on debug-store=database”. For some reason, however, there were a lot of .pdbs in the boost root folder and many libraries could’t be built as DLLs. For example, building boost::thread failed with “...failed compile-c-c++ bin.v2\libs\thread\build\msvc-10.0\debug\debug-store-database\threading-multi\win32\thread.obj...” and many others like this.

I tried building the 1.49 version and everything was fine, so I started digging in the jam files, specifically the one for MSVC - tools\build\v2\tools\msvc.jam. After a lot of wasted time, I was able to locate the problem - in the rule “compile-c-c++”, “PDB_NAME on $(<) = $(<:S=.pdb) ;” (that’s line 383 in the file) was behaving strangely. Reading the boost build guide (http://www.boost.org/boost-build2/doc/userman.pdf), I worked out that $(<) means the first argument, $(<:S) selects the suffix, and $(<:S=.pdb) would replace the suffix with “.pdb” - exactly what we want.

However, for some strange reason the replacement converted “bin.v2\libs\thread\build\msvc-10.0\debug\debug-store-database\threading-multi\win32\thread.obj” into “win32\thread.pdb”. $(<) was the whole string, but the replacement trimmed the beginning. There was no “win32” folder in the root boost directory, so when bjam tried to output some file it failed.

I played around a little with the jam file but didn’t get any results, so I took the easy way out and just created all the folders that are needed. Here’s the full list:

    converter
    cpplexer\re2clex
    encoding
    gregorian
    object
    shared
    std
    util
    win32

I also couldn’t build boost::python with the error message “No python installation configured and autoconfiguration failed”, yet my python was conveniently placed in C:\Python27. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on figuring this out, so I tried a solution I found in this thread http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1704046/boostpython-windows-7-64-bit and it worked so I didn’t dig deeper. This is supposed to fix paths that have whitespace, however it apprarently breaks paths that don’t. So, just locate the line “python-cmd = \"$(python-cmd)\" ;” in the “if [ version.check-jam-version 3 1 17 ] || ( [ os.name ] != NT )” section in the file tools\build\v2\tools\python.jam and comment it with # in the beginning.