Robert Ramey wrote:

Just in case anyone's interested:

I've been struggling to reconcile the problem whereby including a header from boost/serialization/* provokes the autolinking code to request that one of the serialization libraries be included in the link.

The problem is that this library is requested even though there are no pending undefined symbols. So what works fine without autolinking - no missng symbols so the serialization*.lib is not needed fails with autolinking where the library is requested even though it contains no undefined symbols. This shouldn't add any code but it is a pain in the neck to require a library when it is really not needed.

I'm still working on this - but it turns out harder than it looks for reasons that are too tedious to go into here.

I do not know your exact case in your code but the idea, of which you may be aware, is to only include the #pragmas which provide autolinking in a header file which is going to necessitate linking in a shared library. I know this is sometimes difficult to do when a header file includes code, some of which when used will necessitate linking in a shared library while other of which do not. But the general idea, sometimes not easily doable, is to segregate code into separate header files when that is the case. However I admit I do not know specifically where auto-linking is implemented in Boost, and I could not find specific documentation about Boost auto-linking in my 1.32 installation ( I am sure it is there somewhere ). Anyway, having used #pragmas to auto-link a number of my own non-Boost implementations, I thought I would at least chime in about what I know in the hopes of offering some help on the subject matter.