I'm the PTree maintainer, and I know I'm not giving it nearly enough attention as it needs at this stage. I'll get around to it some day soon.
Hi! Thanks for your attention. No worries I know it's easy to get all your time eaten by other projects.
As for your suggestions: parent() is a no-go, I think. I actually suggested it back when the library was first proposed for Boost. I can't remember exactly why the author shot it down, but it was a pretty convincing argument. I'll have to go dig in the archives.
Hum I'd like to hear about it, apparently the tree uses boost::multi_index_container as its implementation. I'm not sure how hard it'd be to make it so node creation store a pointer to their parent.
Setting the default separator is something I'll have to think about. That you can't supply a different separator for operations other than get() is definitely a bug.
Hum sorry I probably missexpressed myself. What I meant is that you have to specify the separator for each .get()/.put() etc request. The code gets quickly too verbose: boost::property_tree::ptree tree; tree.put(boost::property_tree::ptree::path_type("foo/bar", '/'), 123); unsigned n = tree.get<unsigned>(boost::property_tree::ptree::path_type("foo/bar", '/')); boost::property_tree::ptree& child = tree.get_child(boost::property_tree::ptree::path_type("foo/bar", '/')); If one could pass the default separator or pass the path_type to boost::property_tree::ptree (instead of it being deduced from the key_type), one could do: boost::property_tree::ptree tree('/'); tree.put("foo/bar", 123); unsigned n = tree.get<unsigned>("foo/bar"); boost::property_tree::ptree& child = tree.get_child("foo/bar"); I think most people want to change from '.' to '/' for ALL operations, not just one specific key... Thanks! Philippe