On Sun, Nov 29, 2020 at 9:15 AM Peter Dimov via Boost
Jeff Garland wrote:
Why not just alternate releases -- so we'd have a 20 release and then a 17 release, etc?
I have no idea how that's supposed to work.
The point is we wouldn't try to double the number of releases stressing the available resources. For libraries in both releases we would have to have something like release20 and develop20 branches to maintain differences. Libraries only in one of the packages wouldn't have that issue. I'm not claiming this is a fully formed process, but I think something like this could be done.
If we did pull this off, one interesting problem that would be induced is what various linux distros ship with...
Linux distros ship Boost built with the default gcc, with the default C++ standard. g++ defaults to C++03 before g++-6, to C++14 before g++-11. A C++17 Boost will be unshippable for a while. C++14 is kind of acceptable today.
Believe g++10 is now c++14 by default and is on Fedora32 -- redhat 8 also has a version available to customers. The other major consumer of pre-C++11 Boost are non-mainstream platforms
such as z/OS, where people are still stuck with C++03.
See e.g.
https://github.com/boostorg/build/issues/534 https://github.com/boostorg/build/issues/535 https://github.com/boostorg/build/issues/519 https://github.com/boostorg/build/issues/511 https://github.com/boostorg/build/issues/473 https://github.com/boostorg/build/issues/471
Thanks. I'm less concerned with supporting them frankly. They have a boost that they can use now -- the rest of us can move on.