Features/F19Boost153

Fedora 19 Boost 1.53 Uplift

Summary

This feature brings Boost 1.53.0 to Fedora 19.

Owner

• Name: Petr Machata / Denis Arnaud
• Email: pmachata at redhat com / denis dt arnaud_fedora at m4x dt org

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 19 (and its Feature List)
• Last updated: 2013-02-10
• Accepted by Fesco as a Feature for Fedora 19: 2013-01-23
• Percentage of completion: 100%
  • Boost-1.53.0-1.fc19 successful build
  • Dependent packages have been rebuilt on 2013-02-10

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-1.50.0.

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 January 2013). 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.

From Fedora 18, boost-1.50.0 was rebased back to Boost.Build v2, as keeping two distinct build systems sometimes conducted to two distinct binary distributions, for instance, when compared to Debian/Ubuntu deliveries.

Note that upstream Boost has decided, at the end of 2012, to switch to:

• Git repository, with GitHub as one of the main hosting services and project management facilities
• (later on, when the switch to Git will be stable enough) a modularized organisation, and
• CMake as the primary build system, replacing BJam/BBuild

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 18 Boost-1.50 Feature
• 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 modularization status
• Boost ships with an ad-hoc build system named Boost.Build v2.

Benefit to Fedora

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

Scope

The following needs to be done:

• [Optional] Build with CMake
  • 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
• Build with Boost.Build v2
• Request a "boost" build system tag (discussion) (tag request ticket)
• Build boost into that tag (e.g., build)
• Post a request for rebuilds to fedora-devel (e.g., message)
• 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 19 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 will not even start after boost update, because each Boost update implies a soname bump. Currently this returns around 100 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 19 with boost-1.50.

Documentation

• Boost: http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_53_0
• Dedicated process to rebuild all the Fedora packages depending on Boost
• Boost modularization: https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/wiki/CMakeModularizationStatus
• Boost-CMake, the "non official way" (but used up until Fedora 17 to package Boost): http://github.com/pocb/boost
• Boost 1.53.0 Release Notes: http://www.boost.org/users/news/version_1_53_0
• Boost 1.52.0 Release Notes: http://www.boost.org/users/news/version_1_52_0
• Boost 1.51.0 Release Notes: http://www.boost.org/users/news/version_1_51_0
• Boost 1.50.0 Release Notes: http://www.boost.org/users/news/version_1_50_0

Release Notes

Fedora 19 includes Boost version 1.53. Compared to 1.50 shipped with Fedora 18, Boost 1.53 comes with several new libraries: Context (for context switching), Coroutine (a coroutine library), Lockfree (lockfree data structures), Multiprecision (extended precision arithmetic types for floating point, integer and rational arithmetic), Atomic (C++11-style atomic<>) and Odeint (for solving ordinary differential equations). Many other libraries were updated. The detailed release notes are available for Boost 1.51.0, 1.52.0 and 1.53.0.

Note that neither API, nor ABI compatibility with Boost 1.50 may be assumed. Third party applications built against older versions of Boost will need to be recompiled, and may need to be patched to work well with Boost 1.53.

Comments and Discussion

• See Talk:Features/F19Boost153
• BZ: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=892850
• Fesco ticket (#999) / Fesco meeting summary and logs
• There is a dedicated page for the rebuild process