[boost] Request for more detailed change history with releases

From: Russell Hind (rh_gmane_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-07-29 03:14:24

I think the current change history for boost releases isn't adequate. 
It appears that libraries get changed (small and big changes) between 
releases but many of these aren't documented.  A couple of reasons I'd 
like this to be changed are:

1. New functionality added to libraries my go un-noticed.  e.g. I 
recently found out from c.l.m.c++ that bind now supports == and other 
comparison operators.  Peter Dimov has now added this to index.html 
after my request, but if it wasn't there, we may have never realised 
that functionality existed which would be a shame as possibly only new 
users to the library would know about these changes.

2. Compatibility.  e.g. ublas stopped supporting Borland C++Builder in 
1.32.  In 1.31 we used ublas and then tried to move to 1.32 but there 
was no indication of this in the changes history and this is quite 
important.  Significant amounts of time can be invested trying to use 
the new release of boost only to find you can't because one library that 
is core to a user may have been deprecated for that compiler without any 
warning.  It seems to me that there is no easy way to tell this for an 
end user.  Yes there are reqression test results, but these would 
require the user to look at the regression tests for both 1.31 and 1.32 
and compare the two, but I would expect most end users to ignore the 
regression tests, especially once they are already using a version of boost.

I'd really like to see these addressed, especially as we are coming 
towards a 1.33.0 release and we are currently wondering how much effort 
to put in to see if 1.33.0 will work in our current environment which is 
working well with 1.32.0.

I'd really like to see this sort of information on the front page of 
boost but at a minimum I'd like to see library authors keep a change 
history for each release such as that for date-time at

http://www.boost.org/doc/html/date_time/details.html#date_time.changes

Thanks

Russell