boost soname bump

[Petr Machata]

Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> writes:

> On Tue, 2011-11-22 at 14:49 +0100, Petr Machata wrote:
>> Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to> writes:
>> 
>> > It looks like there was a soname bump in boost yesterday. Boost affects
>> > enough stuff, that there really should have been a heads up message posted to
>> > the devel list about this.
>> 
>> Yes, Denis Arnaud has kindly prepared a new release, but forgot to give
>> a yell.  That said, it's been a ritual for about past three years that
>> with every Fedora there comes a point in time when boost breaks all its
>> clients.  That much should be hardly surprising.
>
> Surprising, no, but it could certainly handled better.
>
> The intent of the requirement for a week's notice *in advance* is so
> dependent packages can get out ahead of checking if they'll work with
> the new library without adjustment, and if adjustment is needed, get it
> ready. So that when the bump lands, dependent packages can simply be
> quickly rebuilt, and Rawhide only has major dependency issues for a day
> or two, instead of two weeks while everyone runs around trying to adjust
> for the surprise changes.
>
> Really, for something with as many deps maintained by as many people as
> Boost, it should be required for the bump to be done in a tag and all

It's maintained by me and Denis.  The rest of the people are either
watchers, or bkoz, who formally owns boost, but really has stepped off
some time ago, or Deji, who was granted commit right for some one-off
ABI change in libmpich2, and whom I removed just now.

> (or at least most of) the rebuilds to be completed in the tag prior to
> merging it back into the main Rawhide stream. Some groups already do
> this, to the general benefit of all.

We will consider doing that the next time around, it's not the first
time that I hear this proposal.

Thanks,
PM