Jeff Garland schrieb:
Let me put it another way. We will continue testing and fixing on the all compilers/platforms for which we have volunteers. The difference is, that we aren't going to hold the release up to ensure that less standard compliant compilers are all green.
Do you have any evidence that the last release has been hold up because of less standard compliant compilers? (Note that I already mentioned the following in another mail which didn't make it to the list up to now so I'm going to repeat it here.) My impression as a long time regression tester has been, that the last release simply was held up by a lack of time and/or interest in getting the release out of the door. I know some people have put a lot of time and effort in the release, but I also noticed (in the first nine months after the release branch was created) that nothing visible happened for weeks (which allowed me to fix a lot of things for the platform I care about), only to wittness some small or not so small modification causing major breakage for many platforms. And things would stay like this for a few weeks, before someone seemed to care.
By reducing the number of platforms we can reduce the cycle time for developers to be sure changes are working. This allows us to get new libraries and fixes released to the whole of the Boost community in a more timely fashion. Right now we are essentially delaying releases to provide for a minority of our users.
Because of the things I have written above, I challenge the statement that it's the support for the exotic or less compliant platforms that has held up the release.
And ultimately, these compilers/platforms aren't left out in any way because fixes/ports can go into the next quarterly release. The main thing we need to do at this juncture is 'whatever it takes' to break out of the current release quagmire -- we have important libraries and fixes that have been backed up for over a year now.
I understand that you don't want to repeat the fiasco of the last release, but I think right now you're throwing the baby out with the bath-water. Markus