FetchBoostContent_Declare

Boost library proposals

FetchBoostContent_Declare is particularly useful to experiment with Boost library proposals.

Declare Boost.URL proposal repoDeclare Boost.MySQL proposal repo

FetchBoostContent_Declare(
        boost_url
        # repository outside boostorg:
        GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/CPPAlliance/url
        GIT_TAG        master
)

FetchBoostContent_Declare(
        boost_mysql
        # repository outside boostorg:
        GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/anarthal/mysql
        GIT_TAG        master
)

Boost proposals are often very hard to integrate. Their CMake build scripts assume:

• the module is part of the build distribution and
• usually contain no scripts for installing the library.

This means the library will work with neither with find_package nor with FetchContent. The only alternatives are:

• to install a patched version of Boost on the system or
• to rewrite the build script for these libraries locally.

It's easy to see how this could be inconvenient.

FetchBoostContent makes integration much easier because the modules will be considered a regular Boost sub-library whose dependencies will also be fetched.