Building the Boost libraries on Windows

(using MinGW / MSYS)

See boost_jam.

Download the main Boost libraries from http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/boost/boost/1.40.0/boost_1_40_0.tar.gz and extract them somewhere convenient:

$ tar zxvf boost/boost_1_40_0.tar.gz

Let's see what we've got:

$ bjam --show-libraries
The following libraries require building:
    - date_time
    - filesystem
    - graph
    - graph_parallel
    - iostreams
    - math
    - mpi
    - program_options
    - python
    - regex
    - serialization
    - signals
    - system
    - test
    - thread
    - wave

Jam will detect that you're running Windows and (rather then check what's available) assume that you want to use the MSVC toolchain; you have to force it to use gcc instead. You should also use a separate build directory; it will make it easier to clean up if you make a mistake and need to start over.

$ mkdir obj
$ bjam toolset=gcc --prefix=/usr/local --build-dir=obj

You will get a number of warnings about Boost.Python, Boost.Regex, Boost.Graph and Boost.MPI; you can safely ignore them, as metlibs doesn't use any of them. If it bothers you, you can disable the offending components:

$ bjam toolset=gcc --prefix=/usr/local --build-dir=obj --without-python \
    --without-regex --without-graph --without-graph_parallel --without-mpi

If all goes well, you will find the libraries in the stage/lib subdirectory (under the source tree, not under obj; this is IMHO a mistake on bjam's part). You can copy them to wherever you need them to be, most likely /mingw/lib.