Boost: what to do about it?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Dec 17, 2020, at 10:23, Michael Dickens wrote:

> The best solution I've been able to come up with is to make new boostXYZ ports that are installable in parallel: boost169 already exists, as noted; I don't have it installed yet, but it's on my list to do so, to try to figure out the right way to do such parallel installs. We would then move the current "port:boost" to "port:boost171" and change the dependency for all ports that depend on it. Then, we can add in Boost 1.72 / 73 / 74 / 75, and any port that can be updated to newer Boost has the option to be updated; and, also, all future Boost releases will be simple to add in as a new port.

Yes I agree. Because of boost's lack of backward compatibility, many projects bundle and statically link with whatever boost version they need, but for projects that don't do that, we could improve the situation by having separate ports for several versions of boost.