Request for more detailed change history with releases

I think the current change history for boost releases isn't adequate. It appears that libraries get changed (small and big changes) between releases but many of these aren't documented. A couple of reasons I'd like this to be changed are: 1. New functionality added to libraries my go un-noticed. e.g. I recently found out from c.l.m.c++ that bind now supports == and other comparison operators. Peter Dimov has now added this to index.html after my request, but if it wasn't there, we may have never realised that functionality existed which would be a shame as possibly only new users to the library would know about these changes. 2. Compatibility. e.g. ublas stopped supporting Borland C++Builder in 1.32. In 1.31 we used ublas and then tried to move to 1.32 but there was no indication of this in the changes history and this is quite important. Significant amounts of time can be invested trying to use the new release of boost only to find you can't because one library that is core to a user may have been deprecated for that compiler without any warning. It seems to me that there is no easy way to tell this for an end user. Yes there are reqression test results, but these would require the user to look at the regression tests for both 1.31 and 1.32 and compare the two, but I would expect most end users to ignore the regression tests, especially once they are already using a version of boost. I'd really like to see these addressed, especially as we are coming towards a 1.33.0 release and we are currently wondering how much effort to put in to see if 1.33.0 will work in our current environment which is working well with 1.32.0. I'd really like to see this sort of information on the front page of boost but at a minimum I'd like to see library authors keep a change history for each release such as that for date-time at http://www.boost.org/doc/html/date_time/details.html#date_time.changes Thanks Russell

Russell Hind wrote:
I think the current change history for boost releases isn't adequate. It appears that libraries get changed (small and big changes) between releases but many of these aren't documented. A couple of reasons I'd like this to be changed are:
2. Compatibility. e.g. ublas stopped supporting Borland C++Builder in 1.32. In 1.31 we used ublas and then tried to move to 1.32 but there was no indication of this in the changes history and this is quite important. Significant amounts of time can be invested trying to use the new release of boost only to find you can't because one library that is core to a user may have been deprecated for that compiler without any warning. It seems to me that there is no easy way to tell this for an end user. Yes there are reqression test results, but these would require the user to look at the regression tests for both 1.31 and 1.32 and compare the two, but I would expect most end users to ignore the regression tests, especially once they are already using a version of boost.
I would especially like to see this second item. For any library it should be easy to see which compilers/releases are supported. Having to hunt this down in any other place than that library's documentation, such as in regression tests, is a PITA.
participants (2)
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Edward Diener
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Russell Hind