GNU Radio: now allowing you to shoot yourself in the foot!
We've identified a few versions of Boost that don't work well with GNU Radio, 1.46, 1.47, and 1.52. A little while ago, I updated our cmake build files to look for these specific versions and disable their use if found.
Sadly, many distros currently ship with one of these known bad versions. Looking at Boost's website, 1.47 and 1.52 are by far the most downloaded Boost versions. So, as recommended by Johnathan, I put in a cmake command line option that allows you to override the version check so GNU Radio will build with any current Boost.
To use it, just specify "-DENABLE_BAD_BOOST=True" on your cmake command line. By default this is False. That will allow you to build against anything. If this value is False, all GNU Radio components will be disabled if it finds one of the bad versions. (VOLK and a couple of others will still pass and compile since they are not affected by the problem).
Just be aware that using one of these versions can cause problems. Specifically, it can lock up your application when shutting down a flowgraph. Also, many distros that ship with one of these bad versions also have other, good, versions that you can pretty easily switch to.
Tom