Re: C++: STL 3.2

[Mark Mitchell <mark at codesourcery dot com>]

>>>>> "Jeffrey" == Jeffrey A Law <law@upchuck.cygnus.com> writes:

    Jeffrey>   In message
    Jeffrey> <Pine.GSO.4.10.9904231640040.22202-100000@markab.dbai.tuwien.ac.at
    >> you write: STL 3.2 has been release yesterday:
    >> http://www.sgi.com/Technology/STL/whats_new.html
    >> 
    >> This missed the "Feature freeze date" by one day, but --
    >> considering the relatively long life of our release branches
    >> and the usually high quality of SGI STL releases -- may I
    >> suggest that we merge that in for 1.2?

    Jeffrey> I'd like either Jason or Mark to make the final decision
    Jeffrey> on this.  I won't object because it missed the cut-off by
    Jeffrey> one date given the cycle times for our major releases.

My casual opinion is that we probably ought to take the new release,
but leave out the <limits> and <valarray> bits, since <limits> appears
to be SGI-specific, and <valarray> is not what the v3 people are
using, and introducing the SGI version now will give us more
incompatibilities in the future.

    Jeffrey> However, I would like to see a summary of what binary
    Jeffrey> compatibility problems we are likely to have if we
    Jeffrey> update.

We've already got binary incompatibilities, I think. We updated to
3.11 on 1998-09-02, and activated some new features in the STL on
1998-09-03.  That means that if we didn't break link compatibility we
should probably hope we did: even if things link they may or may not
work correctly with code using 1.1.x era STL code.  (It looks to me
like we branched 1.1.x on 1998-06-27, right?)

It *may be* that the 3.11 update in our current sources didn't break
anything, but I don't think we can know that without a careful audit
of what changed.  It's probably safest just to say that 1.2 is not
binary compatible with 1.1.x, and, if possible, *enforce* that.

But, Jason is probably better able to make this kind of policy
decision than I.

-- 
Mark Mitchell                   mark@codesourcery.com
CodeSourcery, LLC               http://www.codesourcery.com