Boost version in ubuntu 14.04 package

[Peter Peterson]

From Emmanuel Farhi:

Hi there, the Debian package for Mantid 3.2 used boost 1.54 (for e.g. Ubuntu14.04), but the available package for Mantid 3.2.1 refers to boost 1.48 which does not exist in Ubuntu 14.04, but only on Ubuntu 12.04. Could you specify boost>=1.48 in the DEBIAN/control ?

[Andrei Savici]

Mantid 3.2 was built on Ubuntu 12.04. Unfortunately, Ubuntu boost packages contain the version in the name, so you cannot specify version>1.48. The package name in the control file is given by the boost version on the build system (1.48 for the case of Ubuntu 12.04)

One option would be to hardcode the boost version in the cmake file as Boost1.54||Boost1.55||Boost 1.48||... where ... includes all boost versions that we test.

The other option would be to build a release version 3.2 on Ubuntu 14.04

Mantid 3.2.1 is also built with Ubuntu 12.04, and boost 1.48, so it also has problems on newer versions of Ubuntu

[Federico M Pouzols]

Yes, unfortunately it seems that in Ubuntu the boost library version is included as part of the package name (see for example ​http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?suite=trusty&section=all&arch=any&keywords=boost+library&searchon=all). Too bad. As pointed out above, one solution would be to provide binaries built for 14.04 and 12.04.

Another possible workaround: the dev packages do not include the version number in their names (all this seems directly inherited from debian). You'll find for example: libboost-all-dev, or libboost-system-dev (and those include as dependencies the version-named dev packages which in turn include the version-named non-dev packages). This would require/depend on more than what is actually needed, but will probably do the trick. If boost libs are the only dependency that prevents users from installing the 12.04 package in Ubuntu 14.04, this could be worth considering for the future.

[Stuart Campbell]

This ticket has been transferred to github issue ​11114