AlisdairM wrote:
Jeff Garland wrote:
I understand, but that just means 1.34 will be delayed for fixes to these outdated relics and new lousy compilers. We would be better making a clean break now and letting folks with old compilers stick with 1.33.1.
That is harsh for Borland users. The new compiler was released AFTER 1.33.1, with which needs to update several workarounds and then config file before compiling as well as BCB6.
Perhapse it would be useful to ship updates that will update Boost.Config and Boost.Build to support the newer compilers.
If 1.34 does not support Borland either you are really hurting these people, as they have a shiny new improved compiler, but no Boost support and three choices:
Boost currently (partially) supports the Borland compiler. If support for the new compiler isn't there, it would be useful to submit a patch to update Boost.Config correctly. I know that the Octonion/Quaternion library failed to compile on older versions due to a strange preprocessor bug. It has been mentioned that the new version fixes a lot of preprocessor issues, so can these libraries be compiled properly now?
I will happily assist library maintainers hunting down and eradicating support for older Borland compilers, so long as the most recent is supported (until such time that 'most recent' is reasonably conforming and no longer auto-deprecated when a new compiler is released)
I would say that dropping VC6 and GCC2.95 are good choices as these are already supported in the older versions of Boost, so the issue outlined above doesn't apply to these compilers. However, dropping support for the Borland compilers (even though I hasven't used them for a long while now) is a different matter, because it applies to the entire compiler chain. I don't agree that Boost should drop all support for the Borland compilers. For those libraries that do support Borland compilers, it would make sense to drop support for BCB5 as this is similar to dropping support for VC6. - Reece