C++ Boost thread library pulls in the whole development environment

Question

I am using boost-thread in my application. When I deploy this application on a client machine (running Ubuntu 11.10), I need to make sure that libboost_thread.so is available on the machine. However, when I run "apt-get install libboost-thread1.46," it seems to pull in the whole development enviornment (libgcc, libbost1.46-dev, etc.). This machine needs just the runtime environment, not the development environment. I am wondering if there is a better way to handle this.

Answer 1

No such package exception: The package "libboost-thread1.46" does not exist on Ubuntu, is treated by apt-get as a regular expression, and the development package also matches the expression. The two candidate packages are named libboost-thread1.46-dev and libboost-thread1.46.1, where the latter is the package you want. It depends only on three libraries (libgcc, libc, libstdc++), all of which you need to deploy anyway because your program and libboost-thread link against them.

So, deploy by installing libboost-thread1.46.1 and everything should be fine.

Answer 2

You can build individual requirements yourself by download the boost tar and using the bjam build tool.

Answer 3

You could link statically against boost.

Answer 4

You can also use bcp and copy the necessary files into your own source tree. I personally have the headers installed on my system and just added the source files to my project (once.cpp, thread.cpp, timeconv.inl, tss_null.cpp on Linux).