Robert Ramey <ramey <at> rrsd.com> writes: [...]
b) I would think that the "best" solution would be for the Jamfile to detect that spirit 1.6 isn't available on a platform which requires it and skip adding the xml_?archives to the library. So the library would build in such a case without xml_support.
Note that what we're discussing here is a solution for Boost 1.34 . My personal take is that this should be the smallest, simplest change that makes it possible to use serialization with Borland compilers and VC++ 6.5 The solution for 1.35 should be agreed upon with Joel and the other Spirit developers; they are considering making different versions of Spirit available at the same time within the Boost distribution. This would entail a very different approach for future versions.
c) Similarly, tests in such circumstances would exclude tests for xml_archives. These would then show up as blanks on the test matrix - indicating test not performed - perfectly reasonable to me.
I believe that this idea is could be supported with the new V2 in a natural way. I'm not sure how much jamfile gymnastics would be necessary but hopefully it would be pretty straight forward.
I like your approach, but I think it's to late to apply it to Boost 1.34. Cheers, Nicola Musatti