On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 12:32 AM, Haïkel Guémar <karlthered(a)gmail.com>wrote:
Le 29/09/2013 05:44, Dave Johansen a écrit :
I just noticed that the boost141 package had been previously available
in Fedora, but it has since been removed (
https://fedorahosted.org/rel-eng/ticket/5291 ). I'm not familiar with the
recent changes in Boost, but is the API stable enough to support a package
to build on EL 5/6 and Fedora?
Thanks,
Dave
No, you shouldn't assume that.
Some Boost libraries often break the API in subtle ways (like changing the
whole exception hierarchy), or may provide different versions of the API
(ie: filesystem provides only API v2 in 1.41 and since 1.50 only API v3).
You also have to check which libraries are used which may set the lower
version required to build your package.
You may have to provide a newer boost in EPEL, or patch your package to
compile under both versions.
It definitely looks like Boost is not a stable API (
http://upstream-tracker.org/versions/boost.html ). Getting newer versions
added to the EPEL is somewhat hard but doable, but I think that the biggest
issue is that it creates a moving target for EL developers. The purpose of
EL is supposed to be stability and consistency for production environments,
so what's wrong with having a boost141 package in Fedora to allow to a
piece of software to target a known Boost version? To me this seems like
the simplest solution for packages that want to support both EL and Fedora.