Looking at the version of Boost that's being pulled in (1.58), that's actually older than the the version being specified by VFX Reference Platform for 2017 which is 1.61 (https://www.vfxplatform.com/).

I think we should ideally try and stick with the versions coming from the reference platform if possible rather than getting whatever is coming in with the Linux distro. More than likely this will mean a bit more work building from source and adding Boost headers/libraries for these specific versions into Nexus and pulling them down though. Likewise the compiler is GCC 5.4.0 which isn't the version specified by VFX Reference Platform.

I appreciate we're just trying to get things up and running in right now (and we don't even subscribe to this ideology in Travis for OpenVDB), so for expediency I think it makes sense to change CMake in whatever way is needed. Having said that, I would suggest that the Houdini plugins are probably a higher priority to figure out than the Python bindings as I believe most people are exposed to OpenVDB through Houdini these days.