Features/F18Boost150

Fedora 18 Boost 1.50 Uplift

Summary

This feature brings Boost 1.50.0 to Fedora 18.

Owner

• Name: Petr Machata
• Email: pmachata at redhat com

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 18 (and its Feature List)
• Last updated: 2012-05-28
• Percentage of completion: 0%

Detailed Description

That feature aims at synchronising the top of the Fedora tree with the current Boost upstream release. The current Fedora release is boost-1.48.0.

As of Fedora 13, the canonical sources used for the package switched from the official Boost release (with BJam build) to an alternate repository (with CMake build, for boost-1.41.0). That alternate repository has been deprecated and may be deleted any time soon (as of November 2011). boost-1.41.0 has been delivered from that (now deprecated) Boost-CMake repository (hosted on Gitorious), where the code base had slightly diverged from upstream.

From Fedora 14, boost-1.44.0 has been rebased on upstream, with a mere patch implementing CMake support. Moreover, there is a new Git repository reflecting those changes, hosted on GitHub (and cloned on Gitorious). That repository relies on the Ryppl project (in particular, on the Boost Subversion replicated repository), created and maintained by two Boost developers, namely Eric Niebler and Dave Abrahams.

The objective is now to keep delivering the latest stable Boost release for each new Fedora release.

Some background:

• Boost package in Fedora
• Boost build status in Koji
• Fedora 17 Boost-1.48 Feature
• Fedora 16 Boost-1.47 Feature
• Fedora 15 Boost-1.46 Feature
• Fedora 14 Boost-1.44 Feature
• Fedora 13 Boost-1.41 Feature
• Boost ships with an ad-hoc build system named BJam.

Benefit to Fedora

Syncing with upstream keeps Fedora current. This is part of regular package maintenance.

Scope

The following needs to be done:

• Assess whether cmake upstream is ready, possibly help patch the holes
• Do the initial packaging work (possibly on a branch), add sub-packages for new runtime components
• Request a "boost" build system tag (discussion)
• Build boost into that tag
• Post a request for rebuilds to fedora-devel
• Work on rebuilding dependent packages in the tag, fixing any bugs it either the dependent package, or Boost
• When most is done, re-tag all the packages to rawhide

How To Test

• No special hardware is needed.
• Testing of the Boost packages themselves requires the host system to have the boost-test package installed. Testing can then be enabled at package build time by passing --with tests. Note that that testing phase should be done only once per type of architecture and distribution version.
• Integration testing simply consists of installing Boost packages on Fedora 18 and checking that it does not break other packages.

User Experience

Expected to remain largely the same.

Dependencies

There are a large number of dependencies for the boost package in Fedora. The list of packages that really _need_ rebuilding can be obtained as follows:

$ repoquery -s --whatrequires libboost\* | sort -u

Those are packages whose binaries won't even start after boost update, because each Boost update implies a soname bump. Currently this returns 104 packages, with some of those being sub-packages of a single package.

Contingency Plan

Since we will build in a separate tag, if anything goes wildly wrong, the natural result would be abandoning that tag and shipping Fedora 18 with boost-1.48.

Documentation

• Boost: http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_50_0
• Boost-CMake: http://github.com/pocb/boost (the previous wiki is now outdated)
• Boost 1.49.0 Release Notes: http://www.boost.org/users/news/version_1_49_0
• Boost 1.50.0 Release Notes: http://www.boost.org/users/news/version_1_50_0

Comments and Discussion

• See Talk:Features/F18Boost150
• BZ: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=825826