[pkg-boost-devel] Bug#789329: libboost-wave-dev: Requesting the activation of BOOST_WAVE_SUPPORT_MS_EXTENSIONS compilation flag

[Vincent Hobeïka]

Package: libboost-wave-dev
Severity: wishlist

Dear Debian Boost Team,

First, I would like to thank you for your hard work and quality
packages.  

I am the sponsored maintainer of the vera++ package. This package
has a dependency over libboost-wave.

It has been decided upstream to recompile boost wave with vera++ in
order to activate the BOOST_WAVE_SUPPORT_MS_EXTENSIONS cxx flag so
vera++ would be able to parse specific windows identifiers
(__stdcall, __declspec, …). See issue #58¹.

It is indeed nice for vera++ to be able to parse those identifiers
correctly so a Debian server checking source files from windows
developers would correctly report errors related to these
tokens. For instance, there are users of vera++ who runs a svn hook
which refuses commits of source files with bad coding style.

Could it be possible to add the BOOST_WAVE_SUPPORT_MS_EXTENSIONS=1
flag for the compilation of boost wave, please? If not can you
please explain why?

I have checked the BTS if any demands regarding the
BOOST_WAVE_SUPPORT_MS_EXTENSIONS compilation flag for boost wave
have been asked in the past and could not find anything. Is there
anything in Debian which could prevent the activation of this flag
(apart from we never had the need before)?

It would be a pity for Debian to ship a degraded version of
vera++. Moreover, I think it would not be in accordance to the
policy for my package to build its own boost-wave library.

In case you cannot add the previously mentionned flag, what would
be the best practice here?

Thanks in advance for your time.

Best regards,
-- 
Vincent Hobeïka