Hi, Aaron Laws <dartm...@gmail.com> writes:
> I asked on IRC and was told that our targeted boost version is 1.48. There > had been some minor dificulties with some of my commits recently because I > was using boost 1.56, so I thought it would be best to use the officially > targeted version. Now I'm using boost version 1.48 (from boost version > control), and the project doesn't compile using it due to a bug in boost > that produces a narrowing warning. We treat that warning as an error. > > The fact that our gnucash/trunk doesn't compile under the targeted boost > version suggests that nobody's using that version. The reason I've heard > for why we target an old version is because Debian stable has this version > in their repo. I surmise that the thought process is something like: most > people who might want to compile gnucash will use Debian to do so, or > something along those lines. I also surmise, since the project doesn't work > with boost 1.48, that nobody's doing that. No, the thought process is "when we release gnucash we want users to be able to build gnucash using the dependencies provided by their distribution." To that end, we figure out what versions of our dependencies are available on each of the distributions about 6-12 months before our target release date and then choose the oldest version out there. This way when gnucash gets released it should work for the vast majority of users. This works well because generally code that targets an older version of a dependency will usually still work when compiled against a newer version of that dependency. So if we target version 1.48 of libFoo it will generally still work with version 1.50 of libFoo that another user has. Doing it this way makes it easy for users to build gnucash; they don't have to figure out how to install "newer" dependencies on their systems. > I have two concerns: 1) We should seriously consider what version of boost > we target, and 2) I would like to be able to compile the project again :-) Yes, we should consider what version of boost (and indeed any dependency) we target as the "minimum" version. We generally do this based on what's out there in the released world. > 1) doesn't mean that we should change our boost target, but that we should > *use* it for development and production! If we target version 1.48, and I > develop with 1.56 and commit, and we ship based on 1.52, we're asking for > trouble. Yes, this is true. We definitely need to be testing against our minimum version. > Personally, I recommend targetting 1.56 for the following reasons: It is > the most mature, it is the first version of boost using their git repo, > people familiar with cutting-edge Boost will be at home, you won't find > yourself reading "too modern" documentation when researchng Boost. > Answering objections: it's *dead* simple to build...like two commands! It > takes a bit, but very, very simple. Nope, this is a no-go. For example Fedora 20 (a current release) only ships with 1.54. > I don't really care which version we use, but I am quite convinced about > picking some version and *using* it. > > 2) I'm not good enough with autotools to figure out how to add > -Wno-error=narrowing (or whatever needs to happen here) to my particular TU > (src/lib-qof/qof/guid.cpp), any suggestions? > > Thanks! > > In Christ, > Aaron Laws In Moses, > gnucash-devel mailing list > gnucash-devel@gnucash.org > https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel -derek -- Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/ PP-ASEL-IA N1NWH warl...@mit.edu PGP key available _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list gnucash-devel@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
