Building universal boost libraries for Mac OS X

So the other day I found a need, or a want really, for the Boost Filesystem library. Being that I develop on both PPC and Intel macs I also decided I would like to have Universal (i386/ppc) versions of the boost libraries on hand. This became more of a pain, then I would imagine it needing to be. Thanks to this wiki entry on vr juggler’s wiki, I’ve managed to finally build a universal binary of the Boost libraries.

So now that I’ve experienced this nice long painful process, I thought I would share my results with others. You can grab a copy of my repackaged boost 1.34.1 distribution from my public svn, here. Or if a few hundred MBs of downloading isn’t your style, try out my build scripts that I have packaged up.

Both the SVN and build script will get you release build static libraries built for i386/ppc. Of course the script is a bit more powerful, as you can configure it to your ending desire and needs. You should do something similar to the following steps to get up and running:

• Download boost from boost.org
• Download my build scripts
• Do your standard ./configure
• Backup your current Makefile
• Place all the scripts into the root boost folder, overwriting the current Makefile
• You may need to edit the user-config-ppc.jam and user-config-i386.jam files in regards to your python settings
• You may need to edit the INSTALL_DIR, BJAM, and BJAM_CONFIG variables to your liking
• Do a standard make install and it should build away

Now there is no excuse to get your boost on.