"Aaron W. LaFramboise" <aaronrabiddog51@aaronwl.com> writes:
I think they are willing to destabilize the main trunk at least during stage 1.
It's worth pointing out that actual breakage itself is never allowed. All patches must pass regression testing before they can be committed, even in Stage 1. Very rarely is a patch accepted which causes a regression or other failure. Also, it is never ever acceptable for a patch to be committed that breaks bootstrap or some other major functionality, as seems to happen occasionally with Boost, as this prevents actual work or testing from happening.
The previous sorts of broken code are what branches are for.
The destablization allowed in stage 1 is primarily code which passes the regression tests, but is so large or intrusive that there are almost certainly unknown significant bugs or unforeseen problems.
So what's in the regression tests? Do they test every single compiler back-end? Do they have one of every target machine? It seems to me that changes in the intermediate language or even some front-ends might be very difficult to make if they have to keep every host/target combination working. IIUC, people who maintain ports to various targets are domain experts much like the maintainers of various "higher-level" boost libraries. -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting http://www.boost-consulting.com