Roland and Nicola have being discussing the situation with serialization/spirit interaction with not-so-comforming compilers like borland and msvc-6.5. The conclusion as I understand it seems to be: 1. It's possible to make serialization work, by taking previous release of Spirit 1.6, removing Spirit from Boost RC and unpacking older release on top of the tree. 2. The 'out-of-tree' spirit 1.6 does not seem to work, for several reasons: - There's no V2 mechanism to plug out-of-tree spirit 1.6. Both Roland and Nicola have patches to fix this. - For borland, it requires patching Spirit 1.6 to change include statements from ""-includes to <>-includes. We don't have any regression results with the patches spirit. As Alisdair mentions, it would be bad to just drop serialization support for msvc and borland. At the same time, we don't have any idea if spirit 1.6 is the only problem with those compilers, so I think here's what we should do: 1. Nicola sends Roland and me his patched spirit. 2. Roland sets up regression tests that use the patched spirit 1.6. He changes the name of toolsets to indicate that patched spriit is used, say: msvc-6.5_spirit1.6 and does a test run. 3. If results are good enough, or can be made good enough in reasonable time, we make this patched spirit available from SF -- it can be either new release of the spirit project, or new download from the boost project with prominent warning that it's just for msvc-6.5 and borland users. 4. We also mark serialization library as unusable for msvc-6.5 and borland, and include a link for the procedure to download spirit 1.6 and set it up. This way, we correctly indicate that serialization does not work in RC download, say how it can be made to work, and have some test coverage for RC + spirit 1.6. In case if RC + spirit 1.6 has serious problems for msvc/borland, and there's nobody to fix those problems, we'll declare serialization unusable for the problematic toolsets. Now, two questions. 1. Does the above sounds good to everybody involved? Robert? Nicola? Roland? 2. If yes, Nicola and Roland, can you work on this plan? Thanks, Volodya