Change Boost dependency to 1.54 or above?

[Geert Janssens]

On zaterdag 2 september 2017 09:35:17 CEST Sumit Bhardwaj wrote:
> Some time back, John had asked if we can move our Boost dependency to 1.54
> or above so we can use Boost::log. I wanted to check back to see if we are
> at a point where we can move Boost from 1.53 which is where we have it now.
> 
> For reference, Fedora 22 shipped on May 26, 2015 with Boost version 1.58.
> Fedora 26 has version 1.63 and Boost's latest version is 1.65.
> 
Fedora is not a very good reference to determine the lower limit of package 
versions. It generally is very close to upstream.

The distros to check are the long-term supported ones: RHEL/Centos, Ubuntu 
LTS, Debian stable,...

For Ubuntu we currently still have to support 14.04LTS (Trusty), because 
that's what our test environment on Travis uses. That platform however is ok. 
It has boost 1.54 and 1.55 is available as well.

Debian stable was at 1.55 last time I checked.

RHEL/Centos 7 unfortunately are only at boost 1.53. There are ways to get more 
recent versions of boost there, but that would mean either building from 
scratch or configuring a foreign repository. If we require that we essentially 
state we're no longer supporting RHEL/Centos 7.

I'm inclined not to do that and stick with 1.53 instead.

Regards,

Geert