[boost] Re: Re: 1.31.0 regressions

From: Bronek Kozicki (brok_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-02-17 07:51:20

On Mon, 16 Feb 2004 23:57:57 -0700, Victor A. Wagner, Jr. wrote:

> How many more (wo)man years will we waste by telling people "it's ok, you 
> don't have to upgrade, we'll do all the hard work for your broken compiler" ?

they still will need to upgrade from MSVC6 before its end-of-life, which
is announced at the end of September this year (or pay for the support
one more year). Of course, everyone (having bought license) may use
MSVC6 after this time, but I see no point why we (or anybody else) would
want to fully support it at this time, when it's no longer supported by
producer.

> Is this how we make progress?  I mean, it's _only_ been 5 years since the 
> standard was approved.

and MSCV6 was released before standard, in August 1998. I'm really not
sure that introducing serious feature changes (to comply with standard)
in all these service packs (which came later) would be good thing to do.
To make the point - MSVC6 is *really* old compiler, it was released
before standard and soon won't be supported any more (unless you want to
spend extra money or just do not care about support).

> I note with approval that Spirit 1.8 has dropped support for "substantially 
> non-conforming" compilers.

I like it too. And I also like that there is still support for version
1.6.1. . Maybe we should consider following this path, ie. create new
releases without all these nasty workarounds, while still supporting
older release of boost when used with old compilers ?

B.

PS. some links about Microsoft developer tool lifetime:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?pr=lifeDevTool
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;[ln];LifeDevToolFam