Re: [boost] Thoughts on Boost v2

Subject: Re: [boost] Thoughts on Boost v2
From: Niall Douglas (s_sourceforge_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-05-16 19:08:39

On 16 May 2014 at 14:07, Sohail Somani wrote:

> > Thoughts?
> 
> All of this sounds really good, your statements about "vested interests" 
> aside. I'm not one of them, but if I were, maybe I'd find it a little 
> offensive. I'm sure everyone here wants to do a good job.

I'm sure no one is malicious, definitely. But different people have 
different priorities. And there are vested interests, go back and 
examine the past threads on when C++ 11 should enter Boost and what 
happened when Stephen Kelly tried modernising the code.

> Not because of politics or anything, but I would say that you do this 
> independently of the usual Boost repo. Let there be a "C++03 Boost" and 
> a "C++-latest-but-1 Boost". Share as little as possible.

As I mentioned in another thread there are chunks of utilities etc in 
Boost any fork needs. One just needs them based on the C++ 11 STL 
instead.

> I say a big fat yes to CMake. I love the elegance of bjam but CMake + 
> Ninja is ridiculous. CMake is elegant in its own way. And let's not give 
> compiler vendors a pass by using their compiler as a baseline. Have a 
> policy that says that we drop support for compilers that don't support 
> (say) the penultimate standard. If the C++ standard is becoming more 
> iterative, then the compilers need to be as well. So when C++17 is out, 
> the library would support only C++14 with compiler workarounds only for 
> C++14 and up.

I don't mind workarounds for VS2014, for which many will be needed. I 
suspect it's going to become the next MSVC6.

If the C++ 17 feature set is crazy different to C++ 14 - and 
currently, it is not - I don't mind chucking away this set of 
libraries and starting fresh again.

> I would not bring over any existing libraries unless the authors wanted 
> to do so themselves and if they are also going to sunset the old C++03 
> library. For this reason, I'd start with new libraries that are needed 
> just for C++11 code.

Oh sure. This proposal is even more maintainer led than before.

Niall

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