Re: [boost] [1.44] Beta progress?

Subject: Re: [boost] [1.44] Beta progress?
From: Matthias Troyer (troyer_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-07-21 15:10:29

On 20 Jul 2010, at 22:27, Eric Niebler wrote:

> On 7/20/2010 11:24 PM, Matthias Troyer wrote:
>> On 20 Jul 2010, at 15:47, Robert Ramey wrote:
>>> Matthias Troyer wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Robert, another related issue is whether I need to update
>>>> Boost.MPI on the release branch. This will depend on whether you
>>>> push your recent changes to the release branch or not. Can you
>>>> please keep me updated?
>>> 
>>> Most of my recent changes have already been pushed to the release 
>>> branch.  I had just assumed that you're changes were already
>>> there. I had been checking the trunk results of the MPI library and
>>> they looked OK as far as I could tell.  Only now do I realize that
>>> I hadn't been checking the ones in the release branch and of
>>> course they fail. So mpi trunk changes need to be merged over.
>> 
>> I would rather wait for your final version of serialization in 1.44
>> and get the newly reported regressions on the trunk resolved before
>> merging something to the release branch that might break again when
>> you move more changes to the release branch or roll some back. I will
>> wait for the advice of the release manager.
> 
> I may have missed something. What is left for Robert to merge to
> release? Can someone pls summarize the current state of MPI and
> serialization on release for me?

The state of serialization has been mentioned by Robert a few days ago:

On 19 Jul 2010, at 10:36, Robert Ramey wrote:

> I have one that I'm working on right now.
> 
> I made a mistake in release 1.42 and 1.43 which will mean that archives
> created by these versions won't be readable by subsequent versions
> of the serialization library.  I've had a lot of problem with this but
> with the help of interested parties have been making progress.
> 
> I don't know if it'll be ready by wednesday, but I'm just letting you know.

The state of Boost.MPI is that Boost.MPI is broken since Robert introduced some fundamental changes in the types used to store version, class, and object information. Those classes were completely redesigned and the redesign caused Boost.MPI to fail to compile on all platforms. On the trunk I have introduced some workarounds that seem to address the problem on most machines but not all. One issue is the newly removed default constructor of those types that causes compile time failures on Sun (and should actually cause problems on all compilers that strictly conform to the standard). 

In addition, Noel reported that the sandia tests fail, but it is hard for me to say anything about that since, apart from the Sun failures mentioned above, the other failures are runtime failures but I don't see what fails at runtime.

I did not move the workarounds for the solved issues from the trunk to the release branch yet since Robert mentioned that he might roll back to the 1.43 state for 1.44.

Matthias