Re: [boost] Breaking existing libraries

Subject: Re: [boost] Breaking existing libraries
From: Hrvoje Prgeša (hrvoje.prgesa_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-11-20 19:46:18

Tomas Puverle wrote:
> You may or may not have noticed a thread I started on boost.users about the
> breaking changes to Boost.Range.
 >
 > [cut]
> 
> At the moment, I have to say I don’t have a good answer to how to fix our code.
>  However, I would at least like to try to make sure this kind of silent breakage
> doesn’t happen again.
> 
> Tom
> 

I sympathize with you, since it also happened to me a few days ago with 
updating to 1.37 with the boost::exception - previously documented 
features such as BOOST_ERROR_INFO completely disappeared and others like 
diagnostic_information suddenly became free functions and not members 
like before. Yes, the new *substitutes* are nicer and make more sense, 
but the authors could have simply depreciated the old interface (*not* 
remove it) and add the new "features" parallel to it.

In my case there were only a few lines/macros that needed changing but 
it was annoying regardless.

As in your case I couldn't find any written trace of the changes until I 
started compiling and the library wasn't even mentioned in the "changed 
libraries" in the 1.37 release notes!

-- Hrvoje Prgeša