The proposed enhancement of hash<> is supposed to be a conforming extension and something that I feel needs to be part of TR1.x.
On the one hand, one might say that using our hash<> would make it hard for people to migrate to std::tr1, although boost::hash can still be used.
But on the other hand, if we are to propose (again) an enhancement to tr1::hash, we need to have tested it in the field, or it wouldn't be accepted (again). Boost has always been about extensions.
Agreed, as long as we are testing proposed extensions, then making them part of boost::hash (and hence std::tr1::hash when we get a TR1 implementation up and running) is fine. If we want a library of string hash functions though, we'd better give them different names - there are after all many different ways of hashing a string. John.