Robert Ramey wrote:

Dominick Layfield wrote:

Frank Birbacher wrote:

I now noticed that the link I posted does not reference excatly what
I meant to point at. Your code makes me think that you have not read
what I wanted you to read. Here it goes.

READ THIS:

http://www.boost.org/libs/serialization/doc/rationale.html#trap

Well, Hector may not have read this, but I did!

C'mon, c'mon ;-)

  And it seems that I
have the same problem as him.

After I realized what the problem was, I found that it was rather common.

  If I make the object I want to
serialize a const, the (completely incomprehensible) compile error
goes away.  Any chance this could be added to a boost::serialization
FAQ?

you mean change the section named "rationale" to "FAQ"?

Perhaps the comments before the trap (code in the hpp file), should have a hyperlink.

It appears that I have a choice between (i) doing a const_cast on
every object I want to save, and (ii) inserting a
BOOST_CLASS_TRACKING(XXX, boost::serialization::track_never) line
into my source code.

After reading the rationale, I saw that option (ii) allows me to postpone the fight (and I took it). What is more important is that the trap is there to remember it. Perhaps another solution would be to provide a base class for tracking objects. This way, instead of using the macro, one could derive from such class:

class MyClass : private boost::serialization::trackme

And this "trackme" class could have parameters in the constructor to say whether it should be tracked:

MyClass()::MyClass()
: boost::serialization::trackme(never)
{}

or

MyClass()::MyClass()
: boost::serialization::trackme(selectively)
{}

etc ..

This solution would be in addition to the const-reference and BOOST_CLASS_TRACKING ones.

It seems to me that a cleaner, simpler (and less ambitious) solution
would just be to make serialization of pointers an error.

I wouldn't do that. C++ must allow me to shot myself if I'm not careful!!

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