On Sat, Nov 28, 2020 at 11:08 AM Peter Dimov via Boost < boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:
Rainer Deyke wrote:
From a user perspective, forking is an improvement over the status quo: it means that Boost can guarantee that the 1.x line can stop dropping support for old C++ standards, making it relatively safe to upgrade within the 1.x line.
This is only an improvement in the imaginary world where we have enough resources to maintain two forks. In reality, we have trouble maintaining one.
Why not just alternate releases -- so we'd have a 20 release and then a 17 release, etc? Over time we might change the pattern to emphasize the newer distro as libraries drop support for 17. When c++23 rolls around we can move to there. Note that boost.stacktrace has been voted into c++23 so it might be removed in the future. We'd probably need some branches and testing setup to manage this for libraries that might be in both for some period of time. If we did pull this off, one interesting problem that would be induced is what various linux distros ship with...