Fedora 16 Boost 1.47 Uplift

Summary

This feature brings Boost 1.47.0 to Fedora 16.

Owner

Name: Denis Arnaud
Email: denis.arnaud_fedora@m4x.org

Current status

Targeted release: Fedora 16 (and its Feature List)
Last updated: 2011-06-08
Percentage of completion: 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-1.46.0, folded into devel February 2011.

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 should soon be deleted (as of June 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 talented Boost developers, namely Eric Niebler and Dave Abrahams.

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

Some background:

Boost package in Fedora
Boost build status in Koji
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.

Technical details are available in a Bugzilla-filed (#711845) enhancement request.

Benefit to Fedora

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

With every new release of Boost come new components and libraries. For instance, Boost 1.46 brings ICL, and Boost 1.45 had already brought MSM and Polygon.
Moreover, the existing components and libraries are enhanced with new features and bug fixes. For instance, the Boost.Math components have now become better than the GSL for support to statistical analysis.

Scope

Upstream sources for Boost releases are evaluated, along with alternate repositories. One is selected, packaged according to Fedora package conventions and cognizant of existing package practices, tested, evaluated, and then built in Koji. This is then pushed to fedora devel. Dependencies are rebuilt. The unicorns are once again happy, and can go back to drinking champagne and complaining about slow build times.

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.
Once the Boost packages have been built and checked according to the previous step, testing simply consists in installing them on Fedora 16 and checking that it does not break any other package dependency.
Expected results: all the packages depending on Boost (for instance, hugin, gnash, pingus, kdeedu or k3d) should work properly on Fedora 16.

User Experience

Expected to remain largely the same.

Dependencies

There are a large number of dependencies for the boost package in fedora. Here is a non-exhaustive list.

aqsis
asc
avogadro
barry
bastet
bmpx
CGAL
chess
conexus
dchroot
deluge
easystroke
enblend
esperanza
fuse-encfs
fusecommon
1:fife
glob2
glom
gnash
gnote
gnuradio
gpsdrive
HippoDraw
hugin
libpst-python
LuxRender
lyx
k3d
kdeedu
linkage
mapnik
Miro
mkvtoolnix
openvrml
pingus
player
pokerth
pyexiv2
pymilia
python-gnash
python-polybori
python-tag
qbittorent
qpidc
QuantLib
rb_libtorrent
rcsserver3d
rcsslogplayer
rcssserver
referencer
rmol
schroot
simspark
soci
source-highlight
spring
torium
twinkle
urge
usrp
vegastrike
vigra-python
wesnoth
widelands
wp_tray
xmms2
xsd