I've been making use of this library for the past week and it's been very helpful. I've found a couple of ways to improve it for my use and wanted to see if it'd be worth sending the changes upstream, too. 1) Allow default value specification at option query time. This would override the default value (if any) defined in the options_description for this particular query. buffer_size = options["buffer_size"].as<unsigned int>(1024); 2) Add the option name as a parameter to the "notifier" function signature. This became necessary when I started using the wildcard(*) functionality. How else am I to know what the matched config variable was? I just replaced boost::function1 with boost::function2. I imagine this one would need a bit more work since it would break any current users. I could take a stab at it, but if it seems useful, maybe someone more familiar with the library would rather take care of it instead. I'm pretty new to Boost development, so I'm not sure what the next steps would be. The attached patches are against the boost_1_45_0 release. -Josh