F21 System Wide Change: Fedora 21 Boost 1.56 Uplift

[Jaroslav Reznik]

= Proposed System Wide Change:  Fedora 21 Boost 1.56 Uplift =
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/F21Boost156

Change owner(s): Petr Machata <pmachata redhat com> with backup contact, co-
maintainer Denis Arnaud

This change brings Boost 1.56.0 (or, failing that, Boost 1.55.0) to Fedora 21. 

== Detailed Description ==
The aim is to synchronize Fedora with the most recent Boost release. Because 
ABI stability is one of explicit Boost non-goals, this entails rebuilding of 
all dependent packages. This has also always entailed yours truly assisting 
maintainers of client packages in decoding cryptic boostese seen in output 
from g++. Such care is to be expected this time around as well.

Boost 1.56 doesn't have firm schedule yet. Current provisional schedule 
(published at [1]) talks about May 5 2014, which would give us enough time to 
package Boost 1.56. But we may have to package Boost 1.55 instead.

Here is the Fedora 20 Change [2], should you need it. 

== Scope ==
Rebasing Boost has a fairly large impact on Fedora.  For Fedora 20, the scope 
was: about 130 packages _must_ be rebuilt due to ABI breakage inherent in 
bumping Boost sonames.  There were almost 250 client packages total.  I expect 
these numbers to stay largely the same for Fedora 21.

* Proposal owners:
** Build will be done with Boost.Build v2 (which is upstream-sanctioned way of 
building Boost)
** Request a "boost" build system tag ([3]) (tag request ticket[4])
** Build boost into that tag (e.g.,  build [5])
** Post a request for rebuilds to fedora-devel (e.g., message [6])
** Work on rebuilding dependent packages in the tag.
** When most is done, re-tag all the packages to rawhide
** Watch fedora-devel and assist in rebuilding broken Boost clients (by fixing 
the client, or Boost).
* Other developers: Those who depend on Boost DSO's will have to rebuild their 
packages.  Feature owners will alleviate some of this work as indicated above, 
and will assist those whose packages fail to build in debugging them.
* Release engineering: Side tag creation.
* Policies and guidelines: Apart from scope, this is business as usual, so no 
policies, no guidelines.

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/boost-devel-archive/iwJ-GvtkDlg
[2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/F20Boost154
[3] http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2011-November/159908.html
[4] https://fedorahosted.org/rel-eng/ticket/5691
[5] http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=344226
[6] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2012-July/170272.html