David Abrahams wrote:
on Tue Aug 26 2008, "Robert Ramey" <ramey-AT-rrsd.com> wrote:
If you know of cases where people broke backward compatibility in ways that were irresponsible, it would be good to hear about those. And it wouldn't hurt for Boost to have a guidelines page on how to manage interface evolution. I might just write one.
I'm referring specificly to the episode regarding boost exception where by the purpose of boost::throw exception was changed from a limited, lightweight piece of code crafted to address the simple problem that some compilers don't implement "throw" to a heavy weight (includes a bunch of new headers) module whose purpose is totally inpenetrable and adds RTTI requirement to any library which used boost::throw exception. The most gauling was that when i pointed this out, no one seemed to see this as a problem. In fact, there was no acknowedgement that this was even an error. and no promise to fix it. I got the feeling that the author thought this to be perfectly legitimate given the new superior features (which are required by current users) and that I should plan for future episodes of this nature. Which is what I've done by removing dependence on boost/throw_exception.hpp so its now and in the future a non-problem for me. I have done something similar at least one time in the past. Robert Ramey