on Sat Aug 30 2008, "Mat Marcus" <mat-lists-AT-emarcus.org> wrote:
On Sat, Aug 30, 2008 at 10:51 AM, David Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com> wrote:
With apologies for the sales message: my company's Enterprise Support program offers the closest possible equivalent of point releases for Boost. We might be able to help you.
Oops! I was pretty sure I didn't send that to the list, but I unfortunately left the list in the Cc: field. My apologies to all.
Thanks for the note, Dave. I'm afraid that I didn't make my point very clearly. I am not looking for support for boost, nor am I in particularly in favor of dot-releases, except when necessary. I'm concerned about the boost "brand" and the perceived quality of the officially released versions. What gives me trouble is when I lobby for groups to upgrade to 1.35.0 and they pushback saying that no one should upgrade since there's a "serious runtime bug in windows threads" or "filesystem doesn't even compile". If such claims are accurate then I would have expect some action to be taken (beyond "wait for the next release", or "seek out the appropriate experimental hotfix"). One approach would be to produce a dot release. No doubt there are other approaches.
I'd be interested to hear of them. Anyway, thanks for saying all that explicitly; that pretty much echoes my discomfort with our current direction.
Reliability, especially for mature core components, trumps new features when it comes to proliferating boost in our environment. My posts can be viewed as one data point that the perception of world-class reliability has weakened a bit in 1.35.0. I haven't worked with 1.36.0 long enough to know whether this was a one-time fluke.
I don't think it was a fluke, though I hope it will turn out to have been only one time. Among other things, we dramatically reduced the number of platforms for which a clean sheet of tests was a release requirement. I have been working on getting an Suse Linux x86_64 bundle ready for an enterprise customer and there are basic issues on x86_64 Linux that AFAICT would have been addressed had we been testing there as a release requirement. -- Dave Abrahams BoostPro Computing http://www.boostpro.com