To sum it up, what I propose is to go from situation 1 (your proposal) where:
1. The Archive concept does not guarantee serializability of shared_ptrs and types relying on the helper API. 2. There are archive implementations which support an extension of the Archive concept by which shared_ptrs and helper API are supported.
to situation 2 where:
1. The Archive concept is sufficient to guarantee that shared_ptrs and types relying on the helper API are serializable.
Did I get my point through so far? I'm not trying to convince you now,
Suppose we just reverted to 1.34 and documented the helper interace. How would you proposal be different than this? That's what I'm missing. Of course it would mean an expansion of the Archive Concept for just one data type. Another layer of concept for users to (mis)understand and ask about and whatever. And there will always be data types whose authors don't wish to expose enough functionality to be compatiable with boost serialization - so were does it end? And all this for just one such datatype so far? Oh well. Robert Ramey