I'm fine with all of this. In addition to what's been said, here is are a couple of other observations: a) The issue is without spirit 1.6, one file required for xml parsing will not build. The stops the library from being built. which makes the tests show all failure. I copied spirit 1.6 to my machine a long time ago and I've never had a problem testing with it. But then I only test with borland 5.51, 5.64, and msvc 6.1. b) I would think that the "best" solution would be for the Jamfile to detect that spirit 1.6 isn't available on a platform which requires it and skip adding the xml_?archives to the library. So the library would build in such a case without xml_support. c) Similarly, tests in such circumstances would exclude tests for xml_archives. These would then show up as blanks on the test matrix - indicating test not performed - perfectly reasonable to me. I believe that this idea is could be supported with the new V2 in a natural way. I'm not sure how much jamfile gymnastics would be necessary but hopefully it would be pretty straight forward. Robert Ramey
Now, two questions.
1. Does the above sounds good to everybody involved? Robert? Nicola? Roland?
2. If yes, Nicola and Roland, can you work on this plan?