[boost] Legacy Compiler Support (was 1.31.0 regressions)

From: Jeff Garland (jeff_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-02-16 11:30:10

On Mon, 16 Feb 2004 09:31:25 -0500, David Abrahams wrote
> "Victor A. Wagner, Jr." <vawjr_at_[hidden]> writes:

> > when it comes to writing/updating the libraries, support of these
> > fossils is staggeringly expensive.

Agree...

> I just want to point out that the "fossils" with major conformance
> problems are still in extremely wide use in industry, and some are

I agree with Dave on this point.  The issue for projects, especially with a 
large working source base deployed to the world, is that the time to upgrade 
isn't obviously worth the cost and risk of upgrading.  It's usually not the 
development effort that is the problem, it's the testing costs.

> even the latest official releases (see Borland).  One of my most
> progressive and forward-thinking clients is still using vc6 for
> production work.  They're anxious to upgrade to vc7.1, but haven't 
> yet had the opportunity.  I'd love to stop hacking around vc6 and borland
> limitations, but we should be sure we understand what we're doing 
> when that day comes.

I think that the policy Spirit has adopted and I am using for date-time are 
reasonable going forward.  Basically, the concept is to keep the current 
level of support for the library.  Thus if a new feature is added to the 
library and it just works on the legacy compiler that's fine.  If there are 
problems then that compiler that is noted in the compiler support information 
and that's it.  This level of support still requires work to avoid breaking 
features that are currently working, but not as much.  A year from now, I 
think we could go to the next step and drop support altogether for these 
older compilers -- meaning stop regression testing against the old compilers. 

Jeff