Re: [boost] trunk vs release

Subject: Re: [boost] trunk vs release
From: Vladimir Prus (vladimir_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-05-21 14:56:06

Stefan Seefeld wrote:

> Vladimir Prus wrote:
>> Stefan Seefeld wrote:
>>
>>   
>>> Vladimir Prus wrote:
>>>     
>>>>> I don't quite agree. Assuming I have boost version N installed on my
>>>>> system (no matter by what means), I may want to test a given library
>>>>> (from whatever branch) against the installed system, not necessarily a
>>>>> working copy of a whole boost tree.
>>>>>     
>>>>>         
>>>> Can you explain why -- as in specific use cases? Especially given the
>>>> lack of source- and binary- compatibility guarantees.
>>>>   
>>>>       
>>> May be that's precisely what I want to test. :-)
>>> Seriously, if I'm working on a boost library, I may want to test against
>>> different versions of boost (requisite libs).
>>>     
>>
>> Why? I assume not out of mere curiosity, but because you assume some
>> users will use mixed Boost, and then we're back to the question why
>> they might want to do that.
> 
> Let's not get hung up on this particular use-case. Let's just assume
> people want to see (or even validate) whether a particular boost
> component (library) builds against some other (externally managed) boost
> prerequisite.

I don't like "let's just assume". We can build quite a complicated scheme
that does not solve anybody's problem.

> If you don't like that use-case, here is another one:
> A long time ago, Rene was working on a buildbot setup for boost. I
> suggested that a plausible situation would be that contributors might
> want to help testing boost, but not the entire thing, but only one
> module at a time. They would have a known-good ('golden') build of boost
> somewhere on their system, and a full build&test-cycle would then
> consist in checking out the module, build it, test it, send back results
> to the buildmaster. Quite a reasonably small chunk of work, we thought.
> 
> The whole idea was that this was fine-grained enough such that 1) more
> people would be willing to contribute and 2) the time such a task would
> take would be reasonably small, such that the official build / test
> report would always reflect the current state (or with a very small delay).

I think testing a subset of Boost is orthogonal to mixing different versions.
You can checkout all of Boost, and run tests for select libraries.

- Volodya