[ARROW-954] Make it possible to compile Arrow with header-only boost

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 0.4.0
• Component/s: C++
• External issue URL: https://github.com/apache/arrow/issues/16553
• Assignee: Philipp Moritz
• Reporter: Philipp Moritz
• Created: 06/May/17 05:46
• Updated: 11/Jan/23 07:11
• Resolved: 09/May/17 14:01

Description

For certain build environments, it can be beneficial to have a version of arrow that only depends on boost headers:

• It is less brittle in terms of supporting different build environments than dynamically or statically linked boost libraries; also it might make it easier to integrate with an in-tree boost in the future.

• Especially if dynamically linked boost libraries need to be avoided, but the resulting binary is compiled as a shared library python extension, statically linking boost is not an option (many distributions distribute boost static libraries that were compiled without -fPIC)

We should therefore have a flag that makes arrow compile with a header-only boost. This comes at the cost of not supporting the HDFS bridge.