David Abrahams wrote:
I can think of at least one company that might accept support contracts to keep Boost viable with vc6.5. The only question in my mind is whether library maintainers would accept the patches or the company would have to maintain a fork.
Patches are not always practical. For example if you want to support a compiler that does not provide namespaces. The workarounds impact the interface. ACE/TAO, for example, have forked open source versions supported commercially. Enhancements and bug fixes are rolled forward into the cutting edge 'head' versions. This arrangement has worked successfully for many years. And yes I know a commercial company that is willing to accept support contracts to keep Boost viable with vc6.5. The commercial companies provide support for those that need to stay put on old compilers while allowing the community to move forward more rapidly. KevinH -- Kevin Heifner heifner @ ociweb.com http://heifner.blogspot.com Object Computing, Inc. (OCI) www.ociweb.com