The accepted way of building manylinux C++ extensions for python is to build them on a docker using Centos 5.5 as the underlying OS. My extensions have a boost library dependency. With care I can use yum to install Boost 1.44 libraries into the dockers used to build python extensions, and this is the version I currently use. However, this restricts me, and although I use current versions of boost on my builds of these extensions for IOS and Windows, I have to be very careful that the code still works the same for the historic boost version 1.44 on Linux.
What is the best maintainable approach to this. How do I upgrade the boost libraries in my docker while maintaining the Centos 5.5 expected for manylinux compatibility? Can I achieve current boost compatibility?
In such cases, I usually build and install my own version of boost (e.g. 1.63) in a local directory of mine. Now, for linking any applications to the new libraries, I use
LD_LIBRARY_PATHto tell the linker which boost libraries to use.