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