On Wed, Apr 10, 2024 at 2:19 PM Robert Ramey via Boost
On 4/10/24 11:36 AM, René Ferdinand Rivera Morell via Boost wrote:
Do you have a suggestion to encourage you to update to the up to date releases as they happen?
If there were some sort of versioning that might work.
There is, as of 5.0. Which, 5.1, is going to ship with Boost 1.85.
Suppose b2 boost 1.85 is all working. Suppose that b2 contains the check - "guaranteed to work on boost builds up to version 1.85". When b2 starts up, it checks the version of boost it's running on. If the current version of b2 can't work with the current version of boost, it emits an helpful error message and shuts down.
That's possible. We just need to add "require-b2 5.1 ;" to boost-root/Jamroot (or any other jamfile). Which this PR (https://github.com/boostorg/boost/pull/854/files#diff-ea2703244a4dec1e6f7bfe...) will do once I get the final testing on that done and it gets merged.
This actually begs the main question: Why is b2 coupled to the version of Boost in the first place? I don't have time to argue this now.
It's not. I test every change to B2 with Boost versions from 1.66 onward (although I need to add 1.84 and 1.85 when that's released) plus develop and master branches on Windows, Linux, and macOS. For example https://dev.azure.com/bfgroup/B2/_build/results?buildId=1157&view=logs&s=b4a2ddcd-11cb-5970-1bbf-f636351df511&j=3ad4e34e-ab49-518a-e310-16a369583b97. Which means you can use the current B2 with every version of Boost released in the past 7 years.
My current version of booststrap genereates a b2 executable which throws a seg fault at startup. Of course this should never occur. It suggests that b2 needs more tests before being released.
Please, I implore you, submit a bug with repro steps to https://github.com/bfgroup/b2/issues.
But when I do, there's almost always some sort of issue which requires going to the list or slack/boost. Eventually I get this to work and it's quite satisfactory. Basically, the development process for b2 is not resulting in a reliable product.
Do you have suggestions as to what to change in the development process?
Independent test suite for b2.
B2 has had a rather large test suite for close to 2 decades. But testing build systems is challenging. :-(
Don't couple b2 with current version of Boost
Already the case. But maybe you mean something other than providing backward compat? -- -- René Ferdinand Rivera Morell -- Don't Assume Anything -- No Supone Nada -- Robot Dreams - http://robot-dreams.net