Wish INSTALL file had more content

[Phil Endecott]

Each time I build Boost, which is every year or two, I seem to go through the same process:

$ cat INSTALL See ./index.html for information about this release. The "Getting Started" section is a useful starting place.

---

Copyright Beman Dawes, 2008

Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0. See ./LICENSE_1_0.txt or http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txtphil@norway $

(Note the missing newline at the end of the file.)

"Sigh", I think, "I remember from last time, I can't just ./configure; make -j4; make install; and the instructions for what I should do are hidden deep in some HTML file."

Note that I'm never building on a machine with a web browser; it's always a headless system of some sort. I don't think that's too unusual. I consider installing a text-mode web browser like lynx or links of whatever, but think "it can't be that difficult".

$ more index.html Scanning a few pages of raw HTML I find a link to... $ more more/getting_started/index.html And then... $ more more/getting_started/unix-variants.html Scanning 280 lines of HTML, I find the start of the instructions that I need.

It would be really great if the essence of this could be copied into the INSTALL text file:

$ ./bootstrap.sh $ ./b2 -j4 $ ./b2 install

I.e. a translation of what autotools-based packages typically say.