From: Rainer Deyke (rdeyke_at_[hidden])
Date: 2020-11-28 10:02:10
On 28.11.20 00:25, Emil Dotchevski via Boost wrote:
> Deleting support for C++11 and older versions means breaking user code.
> Therefore, forking means fracturing of the community. I don't see how this
> is helpful to the users.
The current status quo is that individual library maintainers can choose
to drop support for old C++ standards at any time. This means that user
are often stuck on a specific version of the 1.x line. From a user
perspective, forking is an improvement over the status quo: it means
that Boost can guarantee that the 1.x line can stop dropping support for
old C++ standards, making it relatively safe to upgrade within the 1.x line.
One of the big weaknesses of Boost, from a user perspective, is the way
releases are handled, with each release potentially containing breaking
changes bundled along with the bug fixes and new features. What I'd
really like to see is a policy where breaking changes are reserved for
major (x.0) versions, with minor (x.y) versions only containing bug
fixes and backwards-compatible new features. Since the major versions
aren't expected to be completely backwards-compatible, they could make
relatively bold changes like dropping obsolete libraries.
(The drawback of this approach is of course that on the developer side
it's a lot more work to support multiple versions of a library in
parallel. I have deliberately taken a user-centric view here.)
-- Rainer Deyke (rainerd_at_[hidden])