Sebastian Ramacher wrote:
As of version 1.34, Boost.PtrContainer supports serialization as defined by Boost.Serialization. Now I'd like to propose a switch to disable this feature. The attached patch adds checks if BOOST_PTR_CONTAINER_NO_SERIALZATION is defined around the serialization related code blocks and enables/disables serialization support.
It's not that I don't like serialization support but on a Debian system you have to install libboost-serialization-dev and libboost-serialization1.34.0 just to use Boost.PtrContainer.
The patch was created against CVS HEAD but I'd gladly provide a patch against 1.34 if it finds any interest.
In my view, a cleaner solution would be to move the serialization code to be external to the container and then optionally included. So, for example, #include <boost/ptr_container/ptr_list_serialize.hpp> would get you the serialization stuff. I didn't look exhaustively, but it looks the the serialization code uses only public interfaces on the containers so this approach should be easy and it avoids all the #ifdef hackery. It would also mean that the serialization dependency is 'off' by default and only gets included at the request of the user. I've been advocating that we move to this approach as much as possible within boost so that there's as much consistency as possible across boost libs w.r.t. this issue. Jeff