[boost] Re: 1.31.0 regressions

From: Bronek Kozicki (brok_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-02-18 03:29:07

On Tue, 17 Feb 2004 16:03:11 -0500, David Abrahams wrote:
> Might be a good idea.  I think I'd like to continue to support vc6 at
> least on the 1.31.x branch, particularly because last-minute changes
> in the graph library broke Boost.Python on vc6 for 1.31.0

If we agree to move in this direction, then in release 1.32 (or little
later) we will be able to drop many workarounds from boost and simplify
testing. But there is question that you raised:

> What would we do about Borland, which is in some ways more broken than
> vc6?  They don't ship a compiler I wouldn't consider broken.  

I heard some voices that their new compiler being currently in beta (or
maybe release candidate?) will be really close to standard. But we can
be sure that old Borland compilers will still be widely in use, partialy
due to lack of VCL support in this new compiler.

> What
> about GCC 2.9Xes, which are standard equipment on some widely-used
> Linux distros?  Way less broken than either of those two compilers,
> but still way out-of-date...

I would think that users of MSVC6, old Borland compilers or GCC 2.95 are
"adoption blockers" and they possibly do not care much about new
features in boost (apparently they also do not care much about decent
implementation of C++ standard library). Thus hopefully they will not
mind if we just ask them to use releases in 1.31.x branch. But it also
means that we will need to support two branches for (at least) next two
years. This might be cumbersome, but on the other hand it should
simplify development in "current" branch.

B.