From: Edward Diener (eldiener_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-07-29 17:09:13
Robert Ramey wrote:
> David Abrahams wrote:
>> on Sun Jul 29 2007, Edward Diener <eldiener-AT-tropicsoft.com> wrote:
>
>> We all know it's a problem, but nobody has yet designed and
>> implemented a solution. Perhaps you'd be willing to take up the
>> charge?
>
> Well, I have the same problem.
>
> Here is what I'm doing to address it.
> snip...
>
> I believe that every user of boost in a production environmentment should
> undergoe this process. (Actually, a similar process should be undertaken
> with all software. Commercial software usually includes a series of tests
> and demos that the user can can run to verify that everything works as it is
> expected to.
You believe that every end user who wants to use a particular Boost
library should run a test script just to determine whether or not that
library is supported by Boost for the compiler/version which that person
uses ?
That would be fine if Boost supplied such a test script for each library
for any particular version of Boost, or even intends to support such a
test script in the future. Is there presently such a script ? If so, and
it were as easy to run as specifying a command on a command line within
whatever is the shell for the particular operating system the user runs,
or even if it were a Python script which requires some version of the
free Python product on the end users machine, I would be glad to use it,
and I imagine many other end users would also.
Please understand I am talking about something which can test any
particular library and not Boost as a whole, since trying to determine
Boost as a whole, for a particular compiler/version for a particular
version of Boost, is done by the config system.
My point is that the config system may well say that a particular
compiler/version is supported as a whole while a particular library may
not support that compiler/version. That is often the case with older,
more non-conforming libraries and while programmer's may well want to
use the latest version of a particular compiler or a better compiler,
the contingencies of work in corporate America, or corporate anyplace
else, as well as the end users own choice, may keep that from happening.