Invalid property <visibility>, unknown feature 'visibility' in boost build/b2/bjam

Question

I want to pass the GCC visibility flag -fvisibility=hidden to b2 using:

b2 (...) linkflags=-fvisibility=hidden (...)

but I get this error:

/usr/share/boost-build/src/build/property.jam:358: in validate1 from module property
error: Invalid property '<visibility>hidden': unknown feature 'visibility'.
/usr/share/boost-build/src/build/property.jam:367: in property.validate from module property
/usr/share/boost-build/src/build/property-set.jam:493: in property-set.create-with-validation from module property-set

How can I solve this ?

I am using b2 in version Boost.Build 2018.02-git

Answer 1

This is because there is a parsing problem in the b2 version that you are using: the parsing interprets the equal character = from the flag value as the setting of a feature (like variant=release).

Use a more recent version of b2. For instance the problem is not present in b2 in version B2 4.6-git from Boost 1.77.