Why is the BOOST C++ library masked?

[potsdamlemur]

I'm interested in using the Boost library for some research projects, as are some other people here. However emerge says that it's masked. This is a little strange since Boost isn't listed in any files in my /usr/portage/profiles (including package.mask). A search of the forums and googling "boost library gentoo" turns up only this: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=6971, which suggests a problem in the Boost threads library, or a compiler bug as of four months ago. Does anyone know if this is still a problem?

Also, are there other reasons for masking the Boost library? I don't need the Boost threads for my present project, so if that's the only problem I'll go ahead and use Boost anyway.

Many thanks.

[sankeld]

Boost is a rapidly changing library that has no formal concept of backwards compatibility. The boost web-page recommends in the FAQ that one freezes a version of boost for every project worked on. This is, of course, not the expected logic behind ebuilds.

Either way, boost is a very nice library (especially signals/threads/regex/blas) and I use it in all of my new C++ applications.

[potsdamlemur]

Thanks --- that makes a lot of sense. Hopefully they'll get to a point where they have a "stable" subset that can be reasonably put into an ebuild (I suspect it will be known as the C++2005 standard library ).

I'm still curious as to why it came up as masked when I couldn't locate it in package.mask (I guess I'm showing my ignorance of the guts of the ebuild system). Perhaps an explanatory entry in package.mask would be appropriate?

[lx]

[clarkbw]

One thing to note about ebuilds is that you don't _have_ to change your make.conf to unstable ("~arch"). If there is an ebuild out there that you'd really like you can use the ebuild file directly to avoid the mask. So when I wanted to install the boost library I went into the boost directory