[ARROW-224] [C++] Address static linking of boost dependencies

• Type: Bug
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 0.2.0
• Component/s: C++
• External issue URL: https://github.com/apache/arrow/issues/15569
• Assignee: Wes McKinney
• Reporter: Wes McKinney
• Created: 22/Jun/16 07:31
• Updated: 11/Jan/23 07:07
• Resolved: 03/Jan/17 12:41

Description

As a follow up to ARROW-222, we will want to provide the option of standalone shared Arrow libraries, or at least forcing certain dependencies (like boost) to be statically linked. The problem with this is that many Linux distributions do not compile the boost static libs with -fPIC, so you get linker errors (see https://travis-ci.org/apache/arrow/jobs/139374716#L1430).

In our CI builds, it would be best to avoid building boost from source each time, so I switched things to depend on boost shared libraries at runtime, but it would be nice to have the option to statically link assuming an appropriately-compiled boost.