F44 Change Proposal: F44 Boost 1 90 [SystemWide]

Project Discussion Change Proposals
, ,
1

F44 Boost 1.90

Wiki

Announced

This is a proposed Change for Fedora Linux.
This document represents a proposed Change. As part of the Changes process, proposals are publicly announced in order to receive community feedback. This proposal will only be implemented if approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee.

Summary :open_book:

This change brings Boost 1.90.0 to Fedora. This will mean Fedora ships with a recent upstream Boost release.

Owner :open_book:

Detailed Description :open_book:

The aim is to synchronize Fedora with the most recent Boost release. Fedora has not had a new Boost update since F40, so it is overdue. Because ABI stability is absent from Boost, this entails rebuilding of all dependent packages. This also entails the change owner assisting maintainers of client packages in decoding cryptic boost-ese seen in output from g++.

The equivalent changes for previous releases are linked from the wiki: Changes/F44 Boost 1 90 - Fedora Project Wiki

Feedback :open_book:

Benefit to Fedora :open_book:

Fedora 44 includes Boost 1.90.

Fedora will stay relevant, as far as Boost clients are concerned.

New libraries:

  • Charconv, Cobalt, Hash2, MQTT5, OpenMethod, Parser, Redis, Scope.
    Updated libraries:
  • Most libraries no longer support C++03 and require at least C++11: Any, Asio, Atomic, Bind, Chrono, ContainerHash, Conversion, CRC, DLL, Filesystem, Format, Function, Graph (requires C++14), Heap, Iterator, LexicalCast, Lockfree, Log, MSM, Optional, Random, Ratio, SmartPtr, Stacktrace, System, Test, Thread, TypeIndex, TypeOf, Unordered, UUID, Variant.

Scope :open_book:

  • Proposal owners:
    ** Build will be done with Boost.Build v2 (which is the upstream-sanctioned way of building Boost)
    ** Request a “f44-boost” [https://docs.pagure.org/releng/sop_adding_side_build_targets.html build system tag] ([ Making sure you're not a bot! discussion]):
    ** Build boost into that tag (take a look at the [Making sure you're not a bot! build #606493] for inspiration)
    ** Post an announcement of starting 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: [ Making sure you're not a bot! #13127]
  • Policies and guidelines:
    ** No changes to policies or guidelines. This is business as usual.
  • Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)
  • Alignment with the Fedora Strategy:
    ** This proposal seems unlikely to increase the number of contributors to Fedora (but won’t hurt either).

Upgrade/compatibility impact :open_book:

  • No manual configuration or data migration needed.
  • Some impact on other packages needing code changes to rebuild. Historically this hasn’t been too much of a problem and could always be resolved before the deadline.

Early Testing (Optional) :open_book:

Do you require ‘QA Blueprint’ support? No

How To Test :open_book:

  • 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 :open_book:

  • 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.
    ** The boost-system subpackage is now empty and no libboost_system.so file is installed. Packages which link to libboost_system should drop it from their build, it is not needed.

Dependencies :open_book:

Packages that must be rebuilt:

$ dnf repoquery --sourcerpm --releasever=rawhide --whatrequires libboost* --disablerepo=* --enablerepo=fedora | sort -u

All clients that consume Boost headers (these don’t need to rebuilt if they don’t depend on any libboost_*.so shared libraries):

$ dnf repoquery --releasever=rawhide --archlist=src --whatrequires boost-devel --disablerepo=‘*’ --enablerepo=fedora-source

Contingency Plan :open_book:

  • Contingency mechanism: Worst case scenario is to abandon the update and simply ship F44 with Boost 1.83, which is already in rawhide.
  • Blocks release? No
  • Blocks product? None

Documentation :open_book:

Release Notes :open_book:

\n\n

Last edited by @jwakely 2025-12-15T22:43:11Z

Last edited by @jwakely 2025-12-15T22:43:11Z

2

How do you feel about the proposal as written?

  • Strongly in favor
  • In favor, with reservations
  • Neutral
  • Opposed, but could be convinced
  • Strongly opposed
0 voters

If you are in favor but have reservations, or are opposed but something could change your mind, please explain in a reply.

We want everyone to be heard, but many posts repeating the same thing actually makes that harder. If you have something new to say, please say it. If, instead, you find someone has already covered what you’d like to express, please simply give that post a :heart: instead of reiterating. You can even do this by email, by replying with the heart emoji or just “+1”. This will make long topics easier to follow.

Please note that this is an advisory “straw poll” meant to gauge sentiment. It isn’t a vote or a scientific survey. See About the Change Proposals category for more about the Change Process and moderation policy.

3

This change proposal has now been submitted to FESCo with ticket #3532 for voting.

To find out more, please visit our Changes Policy documentation.

4

This change has been approved by FESCo and will be included in Fedora Linux 44.
To find out more about how our changes policy works, please visit our docs site.

FESCo Issue: Making sure you're not a bot!