On 3/14/19 5:53 PM, Marshall Clow via Boost wrote:
In the thread "MSVC 2019 and 1.70 beta", there has been a discussion about what to do about support for MSVC 2019, which is due to be released right about the same time that Boost 1.70. One person suggested that we delay the boost release until after the MSVC release (I think the suggestion was "May").
This general question has been discussed before (several times), since tools get released fairly often - and so does Boost.
In general, I am not in favor of delaying boost releases in order to add support for 'about to be released' development tools. There are two main reasons for this:
* There's always another compiler / tool about to be released. Clang 8 is imminent - currently at RC5. GCC 9.1 is scheduled to be released in early May.
* Boost releases happen every four months. August is not really that far off. People who want support for tool XXXX can use "the trunk", getting it either from git or from bintray. [ Everyone knows about the tarballs at bintray, right? https://dl.bintray.com/boostorg/master/ ]
Also, if we were to delay the boost release until May, then what would happen to the August release? The release process for 1.71.0 is scheduled to start at the end of June.
I agree with you, compiler (or other software) releases are not the reason to shift Boost releases. I can add a few reasons to those you have listed: * If the new compiler is not immediately compatibe with the current Boost, there needs to be a potentially significant lag for Boost libraries to be updated. Which might be equivalent lagging one Boost release with out current schedule. If the compiler doesn't break Boost then the problem is non-existent in the first place. * There may also be downstream Boost users who depend on the current schedule.