Our project uses boost and I think many other c++ projects too… It took me quite a time to figure out how to get boost installed on the travis windows build and I ended up building it which takes around 20-25 min of time which in my opinion is huge. we then have to wait for the actual building of project to complete… we could reduce all that time if the boost were pre included with the windows image… I have also searched in chocolatey package manager for the latest version of boost but it ain’t included. Here’s an example for the total build time it took https://travis-ci.org/turtlecoin/turtlecoin/jobs/451504301
I’d very much like to support this, as I struggled with the very same problem the last few days.
However, I also have to note that this is pretty unlikely to happen. Considering the existing build environments (linux and osx) the preinstalled software almost exclusively includes toolchains / build tools, but no libraries. You have the same problem on linux (and solved it the same way there, if I read the output of the respective jobs correctly).
Our approach is to build stuff ourselves and have a dedicated “dependencies” stage and use caching to make the dependencies available to our “build” stage. This still wastes quite some time whenever we need to clear the cache, but seems to be the least worst solution to me.
That being said, caching times out after ten minutes for our windows jobs right now…
atleast in linux and osx there is the package manager that can be used to install the libraries… chocolatey in windows has boost which supports msvc-12 but we have msvc-14/15 in the windows image
I have came across vcpkg which has boost libraries… I think we can use that… is vcpkg installed? if not I am proposing for vcpkg to be pre-installed in the next images…