Re: [boost] [1.34.0] serialization, spirit, borland and msvc-6.5

From: Nicola Musatti (Nicola.Musatti_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-01-29 04:36:29

Vladimir Prus <ghost <at> cs.msu.su> writes:
> 
> Roland and Nicola have being discussing the situation with
> serialization/spirit interaction with not-so-comforming compilers like
> borland and msvc-6.5.
> 
> The conclusion as I understand it seems to be:
> 
> 1. It's possible to make serialization work, by taking previous release of
> Spirit 1.6, removing Spirit from Boost RC and  unpacking older release on
> top of the tree.

Correct.

> 2. The 'out-of-tree' spirit 1.6 does not seem to work, for several
> reasons:
> 
> 	- There's no V2 mechanism to plug out-of-tree spirit 1.6. Both
> 	Roland and Nicola have patches to fix this.

Correct.
 
> 	- For borland, it requires patching Spirit 1.6 to change
> 	include statements from ""-includes to <>-includes.

To be more precise, include directives must use angle brackets and be relative
to the Boost root directory, i.e. look like

#include <boost/spirit/version.hpp>

> We don't have any regression results with the patches spirit.

Correct! Unfortunately the issue with truncated test output made it look like
tests were running without problems.
 
> As Alisdair mentions, it would be bad to just drop serialization support
> for msvc and borland. At the same time, we don't have any idea
> if spirit 1.6 is the only problem with those compilers, so I think
> here's what we should do:
> 
> 	1. Nicola sends Roland and me his patched spirit.

OK.

> 	2. Roland sets up regression tests that use the
> 	patched spirit 1.6. He changes the name of toolsets
> 	to indicate that patched spriit is used, say:
> 
> 		msvc-6.5_spirit1.6
> 
> 	and does a test run.
> 
> 	3. If results are good enough, or can be
> 	made good enough in reasonable time, we make this
> 	patched spirit available from SF -- it can be either new
> 	release of the spirit project, or new download from the
> 	boost project with prominent warning that it's just
> 	for msvc-6.5 and borland users.

Note that once this issue is corrected, we'll be faced with the static linking
problem I mentioned on the Boost Build mailing list. This is currently causing
almost all the serialization static linking tests to fail.

> 	4. We also mark serialization library as unusable for
> 	msvc-6.5 and borland, and include a link for
> 	the procedure to download spirit 1.6 and set it up.
> 
> This way, we correctly indicate that serialization does not work
> in RC download, say how it can be made to work, and have
> some test coverage for RC + spirit 1.6.

No objections.
 
> In case if RC + spirit 1.6 has serious problems for msvc/borland,
> and there's nobody to fix those problems, we'll declare serialization
> unusable for the problematic toolsets.

No objections.
 
> Now, two questions. 
> 
> 1. Does the above sounds good to everybody involved? Robert? Nicola? Roland?

Fine by me.
 
> 2. If yes, Nicola and Roland, can you work on this plan?

Certainly.

Cheers,
Nicola Musatti