Personally, I think the whole concept of "deprecation" is dead end. Any library author has the authority to decide which platforms he will support. Boost only requires that code be conformant with the C++ standard. Its not something that requires or even permits a communal decision. Given this, along with the fact that library authors actually do have varying support for different compilers make the whole discussion irrelevant. Example, the serialization library compiles and passes almost all test with bcb 5.51. Who is to tell me that it should or should not do that. Now the new boost.test library will no longer support this platform. Hence I have two choices stop testing with bcb 5.51 or avoid usage of boost test. This is a decision I'll have to make on my own. Regardless of the course of discussion, concensus, etc regarding which compilers should be or not be supported, the above will remain true, until boost adopts a policy prohibiting code consistent with "non-conformant" compilers - which I don't see as ever happening. Robert Ramey