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: Robert Ramey (ramey_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-03-19 13:23:41

Niall Douglas wrote
> On 19 Mar 2015 at 8:41, Robert Ramey wrote:
> Personally speaking, I'd do that exact merge straight after a Boost 
> release. That gives you the time to find and fix any problems before 
> the next release. In other words, develop lags master by one major 
> Boost release.

My practice is to 

a) decide to address something - feature tweak like adding support for std
smart pointers, fixing outstanding bugs or whatever.
b) fix them in develop.  This includes ancillary stuff like adjusting
documentation
c) run my test scenario as described above
d) merge into master.

I do this independent of the release schedule and do it is "smallish"
chunks.  This generally works pretty well and the serialization library on
the master is of the state "no known fixable bugs".  It does suck a lot of
CPU time but that's free for me now.  The problem comes when something
"breaks".  I might forget how to do something, the build system might have
evolved, etc.  Then I have to call some mental subroutine which takes a lot
of time to get back on track.  The risk of this happening dissuades me from
doing this procedure more often.   In this particular case, he release came
up in the middle of my cycle. 

Having said this, the situation is still much, much better than it use to
be.

a) The git system is pretty friendly for making fixes on branches and
merging them in.
b) the git submodule system works pretty well for us.  It permits me to
leave all the rest of boost (that I depend upon but don't mess with) on the
master branch while the stuff I'm working on is on develop.  A great way to
keep other's experiments from sawing the chair out from under me.
c) C++ standard libraries and compilers are better saving time chasing stuff
down there

On the other hand boost build is still too fragile - it seems every time I
want run it I have to do another troll of how the exact command line to use,
or whatever.  I found it easier to set up CMake for serialization and use
that.  But then of course i risk being surprised when I want to run boost
build tests to be sure I'm still in sync.

So much progress has been made.  Still more to go.

Robert Ramey

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