[boost] Re: (For me a) showstopper [was: boost thread static library]

From: Russell Hind (rhind_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-02-18 06:44:49

Stefan Slapeta wrote:

> - IMO, it's not a 'little fish' to change the runtime libraries of all 
> projects that use Boost.Thread. This and the necessity to ship an 
> additional boost.thread dll is, at least for me and our company, at the 
> moment an absolute showstopper for moving to a future release of boost!
> It is not easy to explain the costs for deploying the shared runtime 
> library on some thousand machines.
> Personally, I'm very disappointed as it seems to be possible in boost, 
> that a whole library becomes unusable for me in a future release. [Not 
> the best example of backward compatibility!]
> 

Well it isn't boosts' fault.  It is a limitation in the way win32 
handles thread cleanup and stuff and currently there isn't a work-around 
for it.  I suggest bug reports to Microsoft rather than having a go at 
the volunteer boost developers.

> - There is NO WORD about that in the whole documentation. If there is 
> one, you hid it very well! What is even worse: there is no word about 
> ANY CHANGES in boost thread in the release notes!
> 

Ok, this I agree with.  There was no mention of this in the changes for 
1.30.x and there probably should have been, but it is fairly obvious the 
first time you build boost::thread from 1.30.x that it isn't there, so 
stick with 1.29.0 until you are at a stage where distributing shared 
runtimes might be possible.  We can't blame boost developers for 
limitations in the windows OS itself.

Cheers

Russell