Changes/F27Boost164

Fedora 27 Boost 1.64 upgrade

Summary

This change brings Boost 1.64.0 to Fedora 27. This will mean F27 ships with a recent upstream Boost release.

Owner

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

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 27
• Last updated: 2017-07-25
• Tracker bug: #1474895

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.

Benefit to Fedora

Fedora 26 includes Boost 1.63 but the latest upstream release, Boost 1.64, was released on Apr 19th, 2017 (the 1.65.0 release isn't scheduled until August 9th so would be too late for F27).

Fedora will stay relevant, as far as Boost clients are concerned. Boost 1.64 brings one new library:

• Boost.Process: A cross-platform library for creating and communicating with child processes.

Scope

• Proposal owners:
  • Build will be done with Boost.Build v2 (which is the upstream-sanctioned way of building Boost)
  • Request a "f27-boost" build system tag (discussion): https://fedorahosted.org/rel-eng/ticket/6235 → f24-boost
  • 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: #6851
  • 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 F27 with Boost 1.63, 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 early July 2017, before the mass rebuild.

• Blocks release? No
• Blocks product? None

Documentation

http://www.boost.org/users/history/version_1_64_0.html 1.64 release notes

Release Notes

(Incomplete) Boost has been upgraded to version 1.64. Apart from a number of bugfixes and improvements to existing libraries, this brings a new library compared to Fedora 26, Boost.Process.