[boost] Deprecation and Boost

From: AlisdairM (alisdair.meredith_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-05-05 01:11:33

It has been agreed that several platforms will be deprecated in this
version of Boost.  To support that I have added a warning to the
Borland config to alert anyone using old versions of this platform that
it is being deprecated and this is the last compatible release.

What I notice is the warning gets annoying pretty quickly.

I propose to wrap the warning in the following test:

#if __BORLANDC__ <= 0x581 && !defined(BOOST_ACKNOWLEDGE_DEPRECATED_1_34)
#  pragma message "...";
#endif

This will allow users to disable the warning by defining the macro in
their environment.

I would like to extend this to a general policy, to make deprecation
more visible were it occurs.  Using the BOOST_ACKNOWLDGE_DEPRECATED
test we could deprecate libraries or functions, as well as platforms.

The test is a simple 'does this macro exist' rather than testing for a
value, so should be compatible with toolchains that allow defining
macros, but not giving them values.

The macro is tied to the specific version that is deprecated, so in
later releases we should grep for BOOST_DEPRECATED and either update
the version, or do something stronger such as use #error (platform) or
remove the code entirely (library)

If this meets approval I will try to write up some more formal
documentation for early next week, and provide something for the 1.34
release notes.

For reference I believe we agreed to deprecate the following platforms
in this release:
  borland < 5.8  [Recommend we only support 5.82]
  gcc 2.95
  MSVC < 7.1
  CW 8.3

-- 
AlisdairM