Immediately after upgrading from Ubuntu 22.04 to Ubuntu 24.04 I found I 
could not build, recent, v3.7 or v3.8 official release sources due 
boost_thread libraries not being found when linking.

Turns out the boost related libraries were upgraded to newer versions, 
but mostly no symbolic links to the generic library names were created 
during the upgrade. In other words, my machine's 
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu post upgrade directory looks like:

-rw-r--r-- 1 ... libboost_thread.so.1.83.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 ... libboost_regex.so.1.83.0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 ... libboost_regex.so -> libboost_regex.so.1.83.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 ... libboost_regex.a
-rw-r--r-- 1 ... libboost_locale.so.1.83.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 ... libboost_iostreams.so.1.83.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 ... libboost_filesystem.so.1.83.0

Likely, if the boost libraries are explicitly installed / re-installed, 
or some tool with a dependency on one or more boost library is installed 
(povray), the necessary symbolic links will be created.

What I did was to create a local directory called

/home/pokorny/boost_libs/v1_83_0

into which I copied all the libboost*.so.1.83.0 libraries. I then 
created two(*) symbolic links in that directory with:

ln -s libboost_thread.so.1.83.0 libboost_thread.so.

and

ln -s libboost_regex.so.1.83.0 libboost_regex.so

The configure script was then run with the flag:

--with-boost-libdir=/home/pokorny/boost_libs/v1_83_0


(*) - The yuqk fork uses the C++ regex capability introduced with C++11.

Bill P.


Additional information
----------------------

For a significant time during v3.8 development the dependencies on boost 
libraries was eliminated. Only header dependencies remained - which 
effectively eliminated the longstanding boost library linking problems.

The yuqk fork, the v4.0 master branch and any other forks branching off 
commits during that time do not have the 'unable to link' boost_thread 
v3.8 beta 2 issue above.

In mid 2021 significant parts of the v3.8 release code was reverted to 
earlier states. This included a reversion to using the boost_thread 
library - and this is why v3.8 beta 2 user builds might hit boost_thread 
linking issues.

Official packages
-----------------

Ubuntu 24.04 (Debian) continues to offer official povray install 
packages for v3.7 - though I didn't install any on my machine for 
development reasons. They are:

fonts-povray - Persistence of vision raytracer (3D renderer) fonts

povray - Persistence of vision raytracer (3D renderer)

povray-doc - Persistence of vision raytracer (3D renderer) documentation

povray-examples - Persistence of vision raytracer (3D renderer) sample files

povray-includes - Persistence of vision raytracer (3D renderer) include 
files

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