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May 2026

20 participants
12 discussions

PRs: Ubuntu toolchain PPAs on Drone CI
by Alexander Grund 06 May '26

06 May '26

Hi maintainers, I recently opened a PR for ~30 repos on Github titled "Enable adding Ubuntu toolchain PPA by default" and wanted to give some background. TLDR: This is an intermediate fix for Drone to avoid failures when an upcoming change in Boost.CI [3] is merged. The proper solution is to update .drone.star from e.g. Boost.CI [4], which has to be done by the maintainers who decide which configurations shall be tested The `.drone.star` CI config eventually calls `ci/drone/linux-cxx-install.sh` from Boost.CI [1] This, for a long time, added the ubuntu-toolchain-r/test PPA to be able to install older or newer compilers than available in the "default" Ubuntu repositories for the used image/container. However this is causing issues: 1. Overhead for adding and downloading from other sources 2. Additional (Avoidable) flakiness when Launchpad isn't reachable, as currently surfaced by many intermediate failures 3. Potential for conflicts with other system software due to "unusual" combinations of e.g. compiler and stdlibs => Standard compilers should be preferred instead of this PPA The Drone script mentioned above will no longer add the PPA by default in the near future [3], flipping the default from opt-out to opt-in. Setting `$ADD_UBUNTU_TOOLCHAIN_PPA=true` allows to *selectively* add it automatically (again) However the changed default will cause failures for Drone jobs using some combinations of compiler and OS. A short term remedy is to globally set `$ADD_UBUNTU_TOOLCHAIN_PPA=true`for the Drone workflow in the repos `.drone.star` with the disadvantages mentioned above. This is what my PRs do, as the right solution below is unfeasible to do alone for the 30 repos. The better solution is to update the CI config to only use "supported" combinations, i.e. compilers that are natively available in the OS version. This can be done by taking the .drone.star from Boost.CI [4] or, for special needs, at least use it to find supported configurations. I strongly encourage authors/maintainers to update their CI accordingly and take that opportunity to ensure all CI (still) passes. - Alex [1] https://github.com/boostorg/boost-ci/blob/master/ci/drone/linux-cxx-install… [3] https://github.com/boostorg/boost-ci/pull/252 [4] https://github.com/boostorg/boost-ci/blob/master/.drone.star

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Updating Boost overview text
by Mark Cooper 05 May '26

05 May '26

Hi everyone, We're updating the overview description of Boost. Please review the following and provide any feedback. Thanks. __________ Boost is a collection of free, peer-reviewed, portable C++ source libraries maintained by an open community of world-class engineers. For more than a quarter century, Boost has set the standard for C++ library engineering. Delivering capabilities the standard does not, from high performance containers and networking to numerical computing and coroutines. Smart pointers, filesystem, regex, variant: they became part of modern C++ because Boost built them first and proved they belonged there. The world's most demanding organizations have validated this work. Aerospace, defense, high frequency trading systems, video games, large scale database engines. When the stakes are highest, Boost is in the stack. And through the Boost Software License, every line of it is freely available for commercial and open source use alike, with no obligation to release your code. Great engineering compounds. Boost is where the next generation of C++ takes shape.

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