Right now, boost::pointee<T*> is evaluated to T via evaluation of boost::detail::is_incrementable<T*>. Unfortunately, this causes a hard error when T is incomplete. See [1] for motivation on why this might be undesirable. It seems there's no loss in partially specializing boost::pointee for pointer types to allow it to be used for incomplete types. Ditto for boost::indirect_reference. Are there issues with this that I might be missing? As both pointee and indirect_reference seem to fall under the purview of Boost.Iterator, I would take responsibility of making this change and adding appropriate unit tests for the incomplete type case. - Jeff [1] https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/ticket/5965