[pkg-boost-devel] about packaging Boost libraries

[Benjamin Kosnik]

I argued your point about mt variants in Jan/Feb on the boost-build
list.

http://lists.boost.org/boost-build/2007/01/16078.php

IMHO boost is fatally flawed in this respect. There is very little
thought about efficient use. It seems unlikely that they will change.

I didn't seem to get any traction on this argument, and threw up my
hands. There are similar issues with ICU and regex... see the recent
boost mailing list dicussion of montone and boost. I am willing to start
shipping -mt variants on fedora (reluctantly), but wanted to switch to
this for 1.34.1 codebases.

I absolutely agree that system layout should be the build variant used
across linux distros, and am glad to see debian moving to this. 

However, I disagree with debian packages in the SONAME they use and
their general approach to versioning. I believe that boost breaks ABI
with regularity, so depending on what boost sources you use you'll have
to take that into account. (Ie, I specifically did not update to
1.34.0 and waited for 1.34.1 for this reason, which was similar to
the 1.33.0 to 1.33.1 problems.) You should not be blindly trusting the
boost developers WRT ABI issues, and should be independently verifying
this yourself and developing a strategy that you thinks makes sense for
your system.

Depending on how debian resolves this, you may actually need to put in
symlinks to the specific sonameversion to the development .so 

best,
 -benjamin