Re: The new Boost 17.0.0

From: Jeff Garland (azswdude_at_[hidden])
Date: 2020-11-29 15:50:08

On Sat, Nov 28, 2020 at 11:08 AM Peter Dimov via Boost <
boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> Rainer Deyke wrote:
>
> > From a user perspective, forking is an improvement over the status quo:
> it
> > means that Boost can guarantee that the 1.x line can stop dropping
> support
> > for old C++ standards, making it relatively safe to upgrade within the
> 1.x
> > line.
>
> This is only an improvement in the imaginary world where we have enough
> resources to maintain two forks. In reality, we have trouble maintaining
> one.
>

Why not just alternate releases -- so we'd have a 20 release and then a 17
release, etc? Over time we might change the pattern to emphasize the newer
distro as libraries drop support for 17.  When c++23 rolls around we can
move to there.  Note that boost.stacktrace has been voted into c++23 so it
might be removed in the future.  We'd probably need some branches and
testing setup to manage this for libraries that might be in both for some
period of time.

If we did pull this off, one interesting problem that would be induced is
what various linux distros ship with...