[pkg-boost-devel] Question about multiple boost packaging

[Steve M. Robbins]

On Sun, Oct 26, 2008 at 12:24:55PM +0800, Deng Xiyue wrote:

> That may help rdepends to migrate to newer boost releases by binNMU,
> but still leaves some problem to be solved.  One of them is what to do
> when a rdepend cannot be trivially ported to newer boost releases?  In
> such case one have to manually add
> ``-L/usr/include/boost_<older_version>'' to LDFLAGS, and have to
> ``-lboost_<component>-<compiler>-<version>'', which is not elegant,
> but still applicable.  Another might be: who will do the migration
> test.

Yes, those are the hard questions.

The problem I see with your proposal is: if a package build-depends on
"boost default" and breaks when boost default is changed, we have a
grave problem on boost.  It is quite difficult to coordinate source
updates to all the boost-using packages in a short time period, which
makes this transition very painful.

This is precisely the issue that drove us away from providing "One
Boost".  

The current situation avoids the issue by not providing a "default
boost".  The cost, potentially, is having too many Boosts.  

My take on this is that we'll deprecate all but one of them right
after Lenny is released.  By this I mean: limited maintenance and
removal after prodding all build-depending packages to upgrade.

Comments welcome.

Regards,
-Steve
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