Re: [boost] [Boost-users] [filesystem][xpressive] Hotfix patches available for 1.36.0

From: David Abrahams (dave_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-08-30 20:32:03

on Sat Aug 30 2008, "Mat Marcus" <mat-lists-AT-emarcus.org> wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 30, 2008 at 10:51 AM, David Abrahams <dave_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
>> With apologies for the sales message: my company's Enterprise Support
>> program offers the closest possible equivalent of point releases for
>> Boost.  We might be able to help you.

Oops!  I was pretty sure I didn't send that to the list, but I
unfortunately left the list in the Cc: field.  My apologies to all.

> Thanks for the note, Dave. I'm afraid that I didn't make my point very
> clearly. I am not looking for support for boost, nor am I in
> particularly in favor of dot-releases, except when necessary. I'm
> concerned about the boost "brand" and the perceived quality of the
> officially released versions.  What gives me trouble is when I lobby
> for groups to upgrade to 1.35.0 and they pushback saying that no one
> should upgrade since there's a "serious runtime bug in windows
> threads" or "filesystem doesn't even compile". If such claims are
> accurate then I would have expect some action to be taken (beyond
> "wait for the next release", or "seek out the appropriate experimental
> hotfix").  One approach would be to produce a dot release. No doubt
> there are other approaches.

I'd be interested to hear of them.

Anyway, thanks for saying all that explicitly; that pretty much echoes
my discomfort with our current direction.

> Reliability, especially for mature core components, trumps new
> features when it comes to proliferating boost in our environment. My
> posts can be viewed as one data point that the perception of
> world-class reliability has weakened a bit in 1.35.0. I haven't worked
> with 1.36.0 long enough to know whether this was a one-time fluke.

I don't think it was a fluke, though I hope it will turn out to have
been only one time.  Among other things, we dramatically reduced the
number of platforms for which a clean sheet of tests was a release
requirement.  I have been working on getting an Suse Linux x86_64 bundle
ready for an enterprise customer and there are basic issues on x86_64
Linux that AFAICT would have been addressed had we been testing there as
a release requirement.

-- 
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com