Re: [Boost-users] what happens between "fixed in development" and "available in release"?

Subject: Re: [Boost-users] what happens between "fixed in development" and "available in release"?
From: Niall Douglas (s_sourceforge_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-03-19 08:21:29

On 18 Mar 2015 at 15:40, oswin krause wrote:

> Question is in the subject. What has to happen after a fix of a bug in 
> development stage before it enters an official release?
> 
> Do not get me wrong, I like boost and all it does for the community and 
> all the effort people put into it. And i really would like to help to 
> speed up certain...processes, but for this i have to know what can block 
> this step?
> 
> Apparently a bug in serialisation - which totally breaks my software to 
> the point where it can not be compiled on several linux distributions 
> und MacOsX since release of boost 1.56 - is fixed in development even 
> prior to 1.57 and is still not available in 1.58. And what I hear from 
> several mails across the mailing list, this is not the only change that 
> got stuck. And somehow i have the feeling that the new boost release 
> cycle won't make the situation any better.

If Robert is holding back a fix to Seralisation, I would be sure he 
has a very good reason to do so.

> As I said, do not get me wrong, but this situation becomes unbearable as 
> these boost versions spread more and more through the ecosystem and 
> there is really nothing on my side I can do about it, except rolling my 
> own implementation and maintaining it, until this whole thing is faded 
> out of all major distributions(you might already get the feeling that I 
> am not really happy about doing that).
> 
> if there is something i can do to help, I will do it. But I now know 
> that "report bugs and investigate possible fixes and send patches" does 
> not necessarily lead to a fast fix and i am pretty frustrated by the 
> situation.

Most Boost libraries with active maintainers are pretty good about 
merging develop to master regularly. Those libraries without active 
maintainers I would personally avoid as you're always going to be 
fighting to find someone willing to merge fixes.

A huge advantage of header only Boost libraries is you are free of 
dependency on the system provided version. Although you shouldn't do 
this, often you can get away with replacing a header only library 
locally with the latest, yet still link to the shared library 
dependencies of a much older Boost version. I should stress the "get 
away with" part of that statement.

Niall
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