Re: [boost] [mpl] Abandoning old compilers

Subject: Re: [boost] [mpl] Abandoning old compilers
From: Daniel James (dnljms_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-03-01 05:11:16

On 1 March 2015 at 03:40, Steven Watanabe <watanabesj_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> AMDG
>
> On 02/28/2015 08:20 PM, Edward Diener wrote:
>> Do we then say that because a library no longer
>> has a primary maintainer who created the library that no changes to the
>> library except for bug fixes should ever be made ?
>
> Absolutely, unless someone new is willing to take
> responsibility for the library.  I would be much
> more conservative about this for MPL than for
> most other libraries, given how fundamental it is.
>
>> That is very
>> unrealistic consider that very few creators of a library are willing to
>> maintain that library perpetually, which is only natural.

I'm not really following this thread, but FWIW I reverted the changes
for 2 reasons: 1) they are large and non-trivial, and no one seems to
have a particularly good understanding of the library, 2) Many of the
the corresponding changes in dependent libraries haven't been merged.

I was especially worried about dependants because I had just
discovered (by coincidence) that a change in type traits which had
broken several libraries in master and no one had noticed. These
things really aren't adequately monitored. There's also the
possibility that these changes can break third party code - the issue
of what is and isn't private to boost has never been clear.

I really think people underestimate the value of a stable code base. I
imagine all of this would be a lot easier if boost had separate stable
and unstable releases. But we don't, so IMO the best way forward for
MPL is to have a new, unstable version, probably concentrating on
recent versions of the standard. Alternatively the plan to factor out
the "core" of the library might result in a simpler, easier to
maintain core containing things people care about, and a less stable
repo for the rest of it.