On Tue, 30 Aug 2005 19:40:29 +1000, Martin Slater wrote
i) My current preference is boost/Y/serialization.hpp ii) On the otherhand, the ones I personally did - shared_ptr and some others have been put into boost/serialization/Y.hpp. This also applies to the STL serialization - since there is not boost/stll/... in any case. b) He should include tests. But where should he put them? The current situation mirror that of the above. The current method of making the library maintainer responsable for making tests pass wouldn't attribute the responsablity to the appropriate party
This is only applicable where serialization can be implemented efficently from the public interface. With boost::dynamic_bitset in particular it's much more efficient to implement internally otherwise you need to iterate over the elements into a temporary structure , serialize it then reverse on load, whereas internally it is just a vector + used count. In these cases then it must(?) be the library maintainer thats responsible for acceptance. Anything else should probably be reviewed and accepted / rejected by you as that is where the complaints will be undoubtbly directed in case of problems;)
My suggestion, at the end of the review, was that serialization code for other boost types should go in the library that provides the type and not in serialization itself. This means that serialization can be extracted from Boost without dragging in dependencies on date-time, multi-index, etc, etc. That is, serialization doesn't wind up with links to all the rest of boost. Instead it is the other way around. And users can easily avoid the serialization dependency by not including serialization headers for the specific library...
c) Is any documentation necessary? - where should it go?
My vote would be with the applicable library.
Also what we decided before. For example: http://www.boost.org/doc/html/date_time/serialization.html Jeff