boost141 and stability of Boost API?

[Dave Johansen]

On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 12:32 AM, Haïkel Guémar <karlthered at 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.
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