Raffi Enficiaud wrote:
Le 05/10/15 23:50, Adam Wulkiewicz a écrit :
[snip]
This is so untrue. I don't know how the majority of the industry works but at least in a part I know about the reality looks different than you think. Believe it or not but there are companies which are bound to c++03 simply because they're shipping some major version of a product on a particular OS comming with a specific compiler.
It also happened to me, but what works best in that case what is to stick to a specific version and backport the fixes, which is much easier (because selective) than sourcing a new version of boost with hundreds of changes. If they need a new version, they first test if it works for them and increment their version if everything is alright.
Companies that heavily depend on a setup do that: they have to control the build environment totally, which means also the specific versions of their dependencies. There is a little bit of a control in production environments, and the desire of upgrading is less important than the overall functional stability of the products.
And in the same time they want the latest Boost features and bugfixes so they're compiling against develop branch of a library.
I strongly disagree on the fact that develop branch has some contract with end users. Develop branch has mainly a testing and packaging value wrt. other libraries of boost, so the merges to master are cleaner and the potential coupling of libraries is properly handled. If some end user wants the latest bug fixes from develop branch, it's his choice to have a code that potentially breaks his/her code.
I would say it is also the same for master. I believe there is a big release effort at every release of boost to get things done properly, and this effort is not performed in between. Also the bug fixes are hardly announced nor published, and until there is no announcement, there is no commitment from boost side. So it is up to the end users if they want to upgrade from master: they might source a code that might break a contract.
Maybe I shouldn't use develop branch in my example, sorry for confusion. My point is that there are users out there who are forced to compile against c++03 and the latest Boost version. Or as in the example going even beyond this. <snip> Regards, Adam