Re: [boost] Deprecation and Boost

From: Nicola Musatti (Nicola.Musatti_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-05-07 17:11:03

AlisdairM wrote:

> Russell Hind wrote:
> 
>>Further to the ublas patches, I'd also like to look at back-porting
>>your bcbboost work to the 1.32 branch which would enable us to
>>possibly move to BDS2006 with boost-1.32.x.  But at the moment, like
>>you, we are stuck on BCB6 and boost-1.32.0 with our ublas patches
>>until Borland releases a compiler that can handle the later versions
>>(which I don't see happening anytime soon given that BDS has only
>>just been released).
> 
> Playing devil's advocate here!
> 
> What is the benefit of doing this in the main Boost CVS, as opposed to
> maintaining another bcbboost_1_32?

The opportunity of combining effort spent on supporting different 
compilers and on bug fixing. Not scattering Boost expertise across 
different, unrelated projects. Reaching more interested developers.

> I doubt we are going to see another patched release of Boost 1.32 at
> this point, the regression testing cost alone is likely prohibitive.

You're probably right. On the other hand it would probably be even 
harder to come up with separate facilities that cater for different 
teams working separately.

The way I see it the most concrete opportunity for open source's 
commercial success is companies with different goals deciding to share 
costs they would all face separately.

When this doesn't happen it just means that there's not enough interest. 
Too bad for those that really were interested, but that's life. However 
I think it would be a pity if this were made impossible artificially.

> By maintaining a separate BCBboost aimed purely at BCB customers, and
> QAing against BCB6 and 2006 only, it is easier to perform necessary
> testing and get it back into the hands of Borland customers.
> 
> You could also integrate Spirit 1.6 as the default version of the
> library at that point too.

Maybe. On the other hand are we sure that there's nobody out there who'd 
like to be able to move forward a couple of Boost releases but can't due 
to having to use an obsolete compiler?

Cheers,
Nicola Musatti