link-compatibility poll: results and feature removal

From: Vladimir Prus (ghost_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-03-02 01:57:44

Here are the results:

It has helped me already	1 vote (off-list)
Sounds important 1 vote 
Not a big deal, can live without it 1 vote 
Eeh.. it just produces pointless messages I can't understand 
0 votes
Never heard about this 0 votes

And my own vote goes for "pointless messages". So, the distibution is very 
even and it's hard to draw a coclusion. Guess I'll have to decide myself.

The problem with link-compatibility check is that they fail in more complex 
scenarious. For example, I want to link single-threaded library into 
multi-threaded one -- I really want that. Yet, I get a warning about 
link-compatibility and I can stop it. Another example is that I have custom 
toolset which is gcc + some extra processing steps. Now, I get numerous 
warnings that the new toolset is not link-compatible with gcc.

That fact that non-trivial cases produce warnings that can't be stopped is 
really unfortunate, because spirious warnings make it almost impossible to 
spot real warnings -- and users will learn to ignore *all* link-compatibility 
warnings.

So, link-compatibility is half-implemented feature. I'm really not sure I'll 
have the time to finish it by 2.0 release. And while I'm sorry to remove a 
feature, especially one that have helped at least one user, I'm going to 
remove it later this week, unless there are good arguments against removal.

- Volodya