I'm trying to write a device for iostreams, but I'm having a hard time understanding how the current sources and the models explained in the documentation are in agreement. Maybe I'm shooting myself in the foot by never being able to work on this for more than 30 minutes at a time and having that 30 minutes be late at night, but... Anyway, it seems odd to me - for example, the boost::iostreams::mapped_file_source class has the following category of source_tag + direct_tag + closable_tag, and has member functions open(), size(), data(), begin(), and end(). None of these are particularly surprising. After all - a mapped_file has to be open()ed at some point. But under what model as defined in the docs? In other words, how and when is that function called, and how does a stream_buffer know he can call open() on a particular device? Also, the documentation indicates that a source device needs to support the read() function - but mapped_file_source has no read() (maybe because it is convertible to 'direct'?). -- Benjamin A. Collins <ben.collins@acm.org> http://bloggoergosum.us