Could NOT find Boost (missing: python37) [cmake 3.15, boost 1.67.0] about libmolgrid

[dkoes]

Do you have boost-python installed? There is some disagreement between distributions of what the suffix of this library should be, which might be the problem (e.g. on Ubuntu I have libboost_python-py36).

[alanbchristie]

Mmm - not sure (you can tell this whole area is new to me) and the whole area for Python 3 is rather confusing and poorly documented. I'm not using conda and installing the system package is pointless (I guess) - because I'm not using the system python.

One day unix might actually move away form Python 2 (especially with it being mothballed in about 4 weeks!). One can dream.

I've installed boost and it claims to have built everything. I'm new to this area of code, is boost-python part of a different repo?

[dkoes]

Look in /usr/lib (or possibly /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu, whereever boost is installed) and look for libboost_python*

There are several variants of boost packages. You need the equivalent of the libboost-all-dev package, which has the libboost-python-dev package as a dependency.

[alanbchristie]

Ah, in my /opt/boost/lib/ is see libboost-python27.* ... even though I followed instructions and used --with-python and --with-python-version and --with-python-root for Python 3.7.

[alanbchristie]

This is starting to look like a boost problem then. My boost installation command is...

./bootstrap.sh \
        --prefix=/opt/boost \
        --with-python=/usr/bin/python3 \
        --with-python-version=3.7 \
        --with-python-root=/usr/local/lib/python3.7
./b2 -j4 install

And what gets built (amongst other things) are some libraries prefixed with libboost_python27.*.

[dkoes]

I've never had trouble building boost. I would try a clean checkout of boost or asking for help on their mailing list.

[alanbchristie]

Solved It's not about the python installation, although I have links to built binary in the form of:-

ln -s /usr/local/bin/python3.7 /usr/bin/python3
ln -s /usr/local/bin/pip3.7 /usr/bin/pip3

Without a ~/user-config.jam boost appears to build for the system python, regardless of the supplied bootstrap args. A home-directory user-config jam file that just contains the following instructs boost to build the libboost_python37 files:-

using python : 3.7 ;

Thanks for the hints - hopefully back on course now.