Changes/F28Boost166

Fedora 28 Boost 1.66 upgrade

Summary

This change brings Boost 1.66.0 to Fedora 28. This will mean F28 ships with a recent upstream Boost release.

Owner

• Name: Jonathan Wakely
• Email: jwakely@fedoraproject.org
• Release notes owner:

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 28
• Last updated: 2018-01-23
• Tracker bug: #1537254

Detailed Description

The aim is to synchronize Fedora with the most recent Boost release. Because ABI stability is one of explicit Boost non-goals, this entails rebuilding of all dependent packages. This has also always entailed yours truly assisting maintainers of client packages in decoding cryptic boost-ese seen in output from g++. Such care is to be expected this time around as well.

The equivalent changes for previous releases were Fedora 22 Change and Fedora 23 Change and Fedora 24 Change and Fedora 26 Change and Fedora 27 Change.

Benefit to Fedora

Fedora 27 includes Boost 1.64 but the latest upstream release, Boost 1.66, was released on Dec 18th, 2017 (the 1.67.0 release isn't scheduled until April so would be too late for F28).

Fedora will stay relevant, as far as Boost clients are concerned. Boost 1.65 and Boost 1.66 bring five new libraries:

• Boost.PolyCollection: Fast containers of polymorphic objects
• Boost.Stacktrace: Gather, store, copy and print backtraces
• Boost.Beast: Portable HTTP, WebSocket, and network operations using only C++11 and Boost.Asio
• Boost.CallableTraits: A header-only C++11 library for the compile-time inspection and manipulation of all 'callable' types.
• Boost.Mp11: A C++11 metaprogramming library

One library has been removed:

• Boost.TR1

Scope

• Proposal owners:
  • Build will be done with Boost.Build v2 (which is the upstream-sanctioned way of building Boost)
  • Request a "f28-boost" build system tag (discussion): https://pagure.io/releng/issue/7278
  • Build boost into that tag (take a look at the build #606493 for inspiration)
  • Post a request for rebuilds to fedora-devel
  • Work on rebuilding dependent packages in the tag.
  • When most is done, re-tag all the packages to rawhide
  • Watch fedora-devel and assist in rebuilding broken Boost clients (by fixing the client, or Boost).

• Other developers:
  • Those who depend on Boost DSOs will have to rebuild their packages. Feature owners will alleviate some of this work as indicated above, and will assist those whose packages fail to build in debugging them.

• Release engineering: #Releng issue 7254 (a check of an impact with Release Engineering is needed)
  • List of deliverables: All deliverables will include updated Boost packages

• Policies and guidelines:
  • Apart from scope, this is business as usual, so no policies, no guidelines.

• Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)

Upgrade/compatibility impact

• No impact on system upgrade.
• No manual configuration or data migration needed.
• Some impact on other packages. Historically this hasn't been too big of a problem and could always be resolved before deadline.

How To Test

• No special hardware is needed.
• Integration testing simply consists of installing Boost packages (dnf install boost) on Fedora and checking that it does not break other packages (see below for a way to obtain a list of boost clients).

User Experience

• Expected to remain largely the same.
• Developers building third-party software on Fedora may need to rebuild against the new Boost packages, and may need to adjust their code if the new Boost release is not source-compatible.

Dependencies

Packages that must be rebuilt: $ repoquery -s --releasever=rawhide --whatrequires libboost\* --disablerepo=* --enablerepo=fedora | sort -u

All clients: $ repoquery --releasever=rawhide --archlist=src --whatrequires boost-devel --disablerepo='*' --enablerepo=fedora-source

Contingency Plan

• Contingency mechanism: Worst case scenario is to abandon the update and simply ship F28 with Boost 1.64, which is already in rawhide.

• Contingency deadline: We will know whether the change can be made once the rebuilds in the side tag are done, which will be late January 2018, before the mass rebuild.

• Blocks release? No
• Blocks product? None

Documentation

• http://www.boost.org/users/history/version_1_66_0.html 1.66 release notes
• http://www.boost.org/users/history/version_1_65_1.html 1.65.1 release notes
• http://www.boost.org/users/history/version_1_65_0.html 1.65 release notes

Release Notes

(Incomplete) Boost has been upgraded to version 1.66. Apart from a number of bugfixes and improvements to existing libraries, this brings several new libraries compared to Fedora 27: Boost.PolyCollection, Boost.Stacktrace, Boost.Beast, Boost.CallableTraits, Boost.Mp11.