Dave Abrahams wrote:
on Fri Jun 22 2012, "Robert Ramey" <ramey-AT-rrsd.com> wrote:
Sorry, I just can't understand why anyone fails to see this point.
Because, while it's true that it has those effects, that sort of thing happens all the time, and most of us see no reasonable way of stopping it without severely constraining Boost development.
Don't you regularly "inject new bodies of code" into Boost.Serialization that "replace lines and add no functionality used/needed by" Boost.MPI?
No. I don't do this. I have made some mistakes - particularly in the implementation of binary_iarchive which have broken other peoples code. But I assure you this was totally unintentional. This wouldn't mean that no new code is never added. Natually one could add a new archive type. But that would only affect those who conciously chose to use it. But that would of course that be a different case.
Don't you expect the author of type_traits to do the same thing?
No. I don't. If I use something like "is_arithmetic" I expect it's functionality to not change in the future.
So we'll just move on as Vicente suggested. That will be satisfactory from my standpoint.
I'm happy to move on if you're really going to put this behind you. If you won't truly be able to, then we should keep talking until we can all understand each other because this is at least the 2nd time we've had a long argument about it and it would be a shame to have to go over the same ground again.
I'm sympathetic to you view here. It wasn't really resolved before - we just worked around it. Basically this is what we're going to continue to do albeit is a less ad hoc way. I'm really sympathetic to those who see this as a pointless, endlee argument. But obviously it's not for those of us involved in it. For the most part I don't doubt the good intentions and sincerity of those who are disagreeing with me here. I just think they're wrong and they they have failed to make a convincing argument that I'm wrong. And I believe that these "wrong ideas" (my view) make a large negative impact on software usability and quality. That's why I take pains to try to exclude them from the serialization library. No Doubt Emil feels the same way about his ideas. So there can really be no real resolution, we can only muddle forward - which is not the worst thing we could do. Robert Ramey