Hi.
I don't know enough about this to say if this is the case here, but non-trivial fixes for long standing bugs aren't really appropriate for the beta period. Particularly if they change behaviour.
I believe the release branch was open for bug fixes at the time. Also, I reported the patch to the newsgroup - both boost.devel & boost.build (see thread 'Re: [boost-build] linking against pre-built libraries'). On the other hand - the patch is stand-alone and already stored on the trunk so it is easy enough to revert if the release manager deems it inappropriate.
Commits: https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/changeset/78937 https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/changeset/78938
More changes than those were merged to release:
Yup, sorry for not listing them all here, but the rest are stylistic changes/refactoring, added checking or changes to code that was not getting run at all and brought the release branch version up to date with the one on the trunk. Here's the exact list of equivalent trunk commits: https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/changeset/78934 https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/changeset/78935 https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/changeset/78936 https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/changeset/78937 https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/changeset/78938 https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/changeset/78939 I now updated the comment for the release branch revision [78941] to include the exact list of corresponding trunk branch revisions and their descriptions.
Mostly whitespace changes? But the changes to 'make-unversioned-links' look significant.
The change you are referring to comes from revision [78939] and is a simple refactoring without any behavioural change (just removed some duplicated crud). Also, the code in question was not getting run at all before commit 78938 due to the syntax error that was preventing the unversioned links from being created. Hope this helps. Best regards, Jurko Gospodnetić