Fedora 17 Boost 1.48 Uplift

Summary

This feature brings Boost 1.48.0 to Fedora 17.

Owner

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

Current status

Targeted release: Fedora 17 (and its Feature List)
Last updated: 2012-02-15
Percentage of completion: 100%
- As of mid-February, no blocking bug is remaining
- Boost 1.48.0 has been released in November 2011.
- The builds have been successful for Rawhide on Koji for both the i386 and x86_64 architectures -- darnaud (Talk - Contrib) 12:50, 20 November 2011 (UTC)
- A ticket has been open for the release engineering team to support in the rebuilding process of the dependant packages -- darnaud (Talk - Contrib) 16:28, 20 November 2011 (UTC)
- It is not up to the release engineering team to support such massive rebuilds. A specific distribution tag should be created for Boost, instead. Then, the massive rebuild would be performed against that specific tag. There has been a discussion on the Fedora-devel mailing list about that topic. -- darnaud (Talk - Contrib) 16:38, 17 December 2011 (UTC)
- Almost all the dependencies have been rebuilt on Fedora Rawhide. Only a few packages are still failing to rebuild (FTBFS bugs need to be created). See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=754865 for more details.

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-1.47.0, folded into devel July 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 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 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 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.

Technical details are available in a Bugzilla-filed (#754865) 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 1.48 brings Container, Locale and Move, and Boost 1.47 had already brought Chrono, Geometry, Phoenix and Ratio.
Moreover, the existing components and libraries are enhanced with new features and bug fixes. For instance, to name a few, Asio, Chrono, Geometry, Maths, Spirit have benefited from numerous bug fixes and small evolutions.

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. Following is a non-exhaustive list, collected from the first Rawhide report:

airrac
airsched
akonadi
aqsis
aqsis-core
aqsis-libs
asc
avogadro
avogadro-libs
barry
bastet
cclive
cegui-python
CGAL
collada-dom
compiz
compiz-fusion-extras
compiz-fusion-unsupported
compiz-gtk
compiz-kde
compiz-plugins-main
easystroke
ekiga
ember
esteid-browser-plugin
fatrat
fawkes-plugin-player
fife
flush
fusecompress
fuse-encfs
gearmand
glob2
glom
glom-libs
gnash
gnash-cygnal
gnash-klash
gnuradio
gpsdrive
guitarix
HippoDraw-python
hugin
hugin-base
iwhd
k3d
kalzium
kalzium-libs
kig
libcompizconfig
libmapi
libmongodb
libopenvrml
libopenvrml-gl
libpst-python
LuxRender
LuxRender-core
LuxRender-devel
LuxRender-lib
lyx
mapnik
mapnik-python
mapnik-utils
mbox2eml
minion
mkvtoolnix
mkvtoolnix-gui
mmseq
mongodb
mongodb-server
mygui
mygui-demos
mygui-devel
mygui-tools
nss-gui
ogre
ogre-samples
ompl
OpenImageIO
openvrml-java
openvrml-javascript
openvrml-nodes
openvrml-xembed
pdns
perl-qpid
pingus
player
plee-the-bear
pokerth
pyactivemq
pyexiv2
pymilia
python-gnash
python-polybori
python-tag
python-visual
qbittorrent
qbittorrent-nox
qpid-cpp-client
qpid-cpp-client-devel
qpid-cpp-client-rdma
qpid-cpp-client-ssl
qpid-cpp-server
qpid-cpp-server-cluster
qpid-cpp-server-rdma
qpid-cpp-server-ssl
qpid-cpp-server-store
qpid-cpp-server-xml
qpid-qmf
QuantLib-test
rb_libtorrent
rb_libtorrent-examples
rb_libtorrent-python
rcsslogplayer
rcssmonitor
rcssserver
rmol
ruby-qpid-qmf
schroot
simfqt
simspark
source-highlight
spring
springlobby
stdair
swift
tncfhh-examples
tncfhh-libs
travelccm
twinkle
undertaker
vegastrike
vigra-python
votca-csg
votca-csg-libs
votca-tools
wesnoth
wesnoth-server
wesnoth-tools
wlmproxy
xsd
zarafa-server