On Wednesday, 18 December 2013 18:05:46 CEST, "C. Bergström" wrote:
If moving to C++11 - Isn't that considered just part of the work along the path? There's some clang tools to help with the migration, but I don't think anyone expects it to be zero work. The flag is just a way to a) enable building programs that can be built with c++11 b) flush out the culprits in the cases it can't be. If (b) is a bug - how else to find it easily?
This perspective is interesting (and I admit that I tend to like it) -- considering packages which won't build with C++11 to be buggy.
I'm worried by the cost of such a policy, though, because we would suddenly have to patch some unknown amount of software (and I'm pretty sure some upstreams would reject these patches anyway). If we were an enterprise distro with binary compatibility requirements, we would also have to worry about that and either assume that the ABI changes are non-issue in real world, or provide two versions of all C++ libraries. I tried to check how RHEL7 will deal with it, but I wasn't able to find any information about that. It also seems that Fedora hasn't addressed this yet, either.
Either way, it is reasonable to assume that some users would like to build their own software and link it with system libraries. It is not reasonable to force these users to build in the C++11 mode, IMHO.
Cheers, Jan
