On Wed, 31 Mar 2004 08:08:07 -0500, David Abrahams <dave@boost-consulting.com> wrote:

Bronek Kozicki <brok@rubikon.pl> writes:

...

Relevant Knowledge Base article with list of fixes is here http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;834001

Actual download (63MB) is here http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=A8494EDB-2E89-4676-...

I though that Boost.Python users might be interested

Thanks for the heads-up!

Dave, is there a boost policy about these sorts of things? I mean: should we always use the latest patch level of each compiler? In this case, for instance, if you test things with VC6 SP5 and they work you may be reasonably sure they also work with SP6. But if you test with SP6... you could be taking advantage of new fixes, and users who still use SP5 would be forced to update their compiler. For private uses that's not a problem, but in a more complex (commercial) environment it could be impossible. Genny.

On Wed, 31 Mar 2004 12:39:18 -0500, David Abrahams wrote:

...

Dave, is there a boost policy about these sorts of things?

No.

I want to explain something: I doubt there are any changes to C++ front-end compiler. Of course, there are some critical fixes (like http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=320739 "FIX: No error generated when accessing non-static member in static function"), but there won't be any better conformance with standard. MSVC6 is an old compiler, older than C++ standard, and its conformance with standard is not going to get any better. I did not checked that with MS folks, above statement is just result of my examination of fixes list. Of course there might be more fixes than those listed (this is nature of service packs), but as there are very few related to front-end, I doubt they did any serious changes in this part of MSVC6. Anyway I believe that boost will compile the same way on MSVC6 with SP6 as it was with SP5 - old errors will stay, hopefully there won't be new ones. What actually SP6 is going to improve is to remove bugs from runtime library and back-end (plus removing some other bugs in IDE). B.

On Wed, 31 Mar 2004 16:28:02 -0500, David Abrahams wrote:

They did fix some codegen bugs, which affect conformance.

Thanks for correction B.