Re: [boost] New dependency report

Subject: Re: [boost] New dependency report
From: Daniel James (dnljms_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-06-06 17:23:30

On 6 June 2014 21:41, Edward Diener <eldiener_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
> Looking through code in MPL, and other long-standing libraries may be
> similar, the need to keep compiler workarounds in the code for compilers
> which are obsolete, or do not implement basic parts of even the C++ 98
> standard, makes understanding and updating code fairly difficult in many
> cases. I believe that Boost has a right to say to those who still want to
> use some of these compilers with Boost that they will have to stick to
> previous versions. It really becomes difficult for a number of Boost
> libraries to move forward if they have to continually support poorly
> conforming compilers. As obvious examples I would not bother trying to
> support VC++ versions prior to VS2005/VC8 and I would not bother trying to
> support gcc versions prior to 4.0 etc.

It would be nice if you responded to what I wrote rather than what you
imagined I wrote. The problem with the MPL changes was that they were
non-trivial, and for a library which is very arcane (with or without
workarounds), has little maintenance and a lot of dependants, some of
which are unmaintained. Also, many of the dependants hadn't merged
Stephen Kelly's changes (some still haven't) and it wasn't clear if it
was safe to merge MPL before them. It was nothing to do with
maintaining support for Visual C++ 7.0.