Hi, >.......................... However, the active development on the >libstdc++.so.7 branch means that we haven't even started the clock >running on this criterion yet. > > Maybe a clarification is in order: actually, the name libstdcxx_so_7-branch is somewhat misleading, right now. Indeed, it's absolutely true that a lot of active development is going on in that branch (consider the nice changes contributed by Chris Jefferson, for instance, and more will come), but not necessarily all those changes actually break to ABI. In a nutshell, we are using that branch for new, experimental features/optimizations that *may* break the ABI. For instance, in my understanding at least, if we decide somehow in the future to ship a different implementation of basic_string, that will break the ABI. Probably this is not the case for many changes to the containers, *very* little of which is present in the built *.a and *.so. Really, during the next months we want to re-evaluate the various subsets of changes for possible merge to 4.1 or, anyway, not-ABI-breaking branches.
I'm not sure what the above may imply for your ongoing discussion, tough... Paolo.
