From: Russell Hind (rh_gmane_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-07-29 03:14:24
I think the current change history for boost releases isn't adequate.
It appears that libraries get changed (small and big changes) between
releases but many of these aren't documented. A couple of reasons I'd
like this to be changed are:
1. New functionality added to libraries my go un-noticed. e.g. I
recently found out from c.l.m.c++ that bind now supports == and other
comparison operators. Peter Dimov has now added this to index.html
after my request, but if it wasn't there, we may have never realised
that functionality existed which would be a shame as possibly only new
users to the library would know about these changes.
2. Compatibility. e.g. ublas stopped supporting Borland C++Builder in
1.32. In 1.31 we used ublas and then tried to move to 1.32 but there
was no indication of this in the changes history and this is quite
important. Significant amounts of time can be invested trying to use
the new release of boost only to find you can't because one library that
is core to a user may have been deprecated for that compiler without any
warning. It seems to me that there is no easy way to tell this for an
end user. Yes there are reqression test results, but these would
require the user to look at the regression tests for both 1.31 and 1.32
and compare the two, but I would expect most end users to ignore the
regression tests, especially once they are already using a version of boost.
I'd really like to see these addressed, especially as we are coming
towards a 1.33.0 release and we are currently wondering how much effort
to put in to see if 1.33.0 will work in our current environment which is
working well with 1.32.0.
I'd really like to see this sort of information on the front page of
boost but at a minimum I'd like to see library authors keep a change
history for each release such as that for date-time at
http://www.boost.org/doc/html/date_time/details.html#date_time.changes
Thanks
Russell