2008/4/24 Vladimir Prus <ghost@cs.msu.su>:
1. Applications using 1.35.0 need not be changed at all. 2. If application link to 1.35.0 as dynamic library, then switching them to use 1.35.1 should not break anything.
Does this make sense, and if so, can we officially document such a policy?
I think this would be a very good thing, but I'm not sure how practical it would be. There are already at least two changes in the release branch which break ABI compatability (I might be wrong, I only had a quick look at the changesets): http://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/changeset/44414 http://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/changeset/44440 We do so much in headers that this would require a lot of discipline and prevent a lot of fixes. It'd be nice to be able to test for ABI compatibility, perhaps by running the tests with one version, and the libraries with another. Would that be effective? We'd also need more frequent releases so that those fixes could be pushed out sooner but we need that anyway. Daniel