Beman Dawes wrote:
Hotfix patches are available to fix Boost.Filesystem and Boost.Xpressive [1.36.0] problems. See https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/wiki/ReleasePractices/HotFixes
Providing hotfix patches is something new and experimental for Boost. Please let us know if you find the patches useful or have other comments.
Are these libraries usable without these hotfixes or should they be considered required? At my company we use Boost directly and use libraries that depend on Boost. We push those developers to upgrade their libraries when a new version of Boost is released and we realize that it is a burden on them and us to make the switch to the new versions. Generally this means there is a lag between release and adoption as we cannot move forward with a new version of Boost until all the third party libraries that we interface with upgrade their libraries to the new version of Boost. In my opinion this makes hotfixes worse than useless for us. We might not be able to upgrade to Boost+libraries that use Boost. For instance if library A upgrades to 1.36 plain and library B upgrades to 1.36 plus all or some of the hotfixes. If this compatibility problem occurs and the libraries also provide critical fixes to their own library then I believe we are stuck and must either drop the library, drop boost, or wait for everything to resynchronize. I may be overreacting but this seems very dangerous to me. If there are critical fixes I'd much rather have a point release which we can easily identify to the third party library providers. If the fixes are not critical enough to justify making a point release than they should wait until the next release. Thanks, Michael Marcin