On Nov 7, 2010, at 2:19 PM, Krzysztof KosiĆski wrote:
The build failure is caused by a bug in Boost.MPL. The version in devlibs is 4 years old (1.34.1). No errors were reported for Unix environments so far. So in this specific case upgrading Boost in devlibs to fix it should be OK. If any Linux distro had such an ancient copy of Boost, it would fail our GTK platform requirements.
Thanks, the version number was what I was literally writing a note to ask for.
The most helpful thing would be to determine which version of BOOST fixes the issue. We now know that it is somewhere later than 1.34.1 but before 1.44.
Again, though, I'd like to stress that "build for me" or "builds for us" is not always a safe test. I just did a quick scan, and found that one of the main corporate distros (RHEL 5, CentOS 5) has BOOST 1.33.1. So if we require more than that, we cut ourselves out of a huge portion of the professional market.
A quick RPM Find search shows that OpenSUSE 11 had BOOST 1.34.1. That is a current version of OpenSUSE. BOOST 1.36.1 and 1.39.0 are also in 11.x versions
The bottom line is that if we do bump up requirements, we need to be precise about it. If nothing else we will be able to let people know up front that their distro is no longer supported. And avoiding a requirement on the latest-and-greatest of a lib will keep our potential users from being significantly reduced.