On 16/10/2017 3:26, Beman Dawes via Boost wrote:
On Sat, Oct 14, 2017 at 5:25 PM, Peter Dimov via Boost < boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:
James E. King, III wrote:
Actually my intention was not to discuss this just for the format library
- but for all libraries. There shouldn't be a need to support msvc-7.1 by any library at stated it is past support and I don't think it's worth anybody spending time dealing with it in development or in test at this point.
The reason we have an msvc-7.1 tester in the matrix is that Ion Gaztañaga cares enough (or cared enough - don't how how strongly he feels about it now) to run it. Having msvc-7.1 tested does not necessarily create any obligation on part of library maintainers to support it; whoever wants to, can.
I care because my libraries support old compilers. The same happens with older GCCs, it's not a msvc-exclusive problem. I think it would be nice if there was a way (maybe it exists now) to state in the test/build jamfile the minimum supported toolchains (say msvc >= 9.0, gcc >= 4.2) by that library / test. This could allow just avoiding the compilation phase, printing a well-known message. The giant error outputs (which requires a huge amount of CPU and time in my runners) would go away and the matrix could just show something like "unsupported" or just avoid showing that column. Best, Ion