Re: [boost] [serialization] Regressions?

From: Robert Ramey (ramey_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-06-28 08:57:36

David Abrahams wrote:
> "Robert Ramey" <ramey_at_[hidden]> writes:
>
>> So my motivation was and is purely practical.  I expected that the
>> only people inconvenienced by this are those that are inconvenienced
>> by const in general.  And that they would handle it the same way.
>> They would just grumble and apply a const_cast and forget about it.
>> I'm certainly not prohibiting that.
>
> Robert,
>
> How is your rule any different from trapping serialization of all
> non-pointer types whose name begins with an uppercase letter?  There's
> an easy workaround (just serialize via pointer) and

> the conditions of the trap have as much to do with the problem you're
trying to detect.

Of course this is what I'm not seeing.  I believe that if someone has
situation where he feels that he has to use a const_cast, its likely that he
plans to change the value during the course of the creation of the archive.
If its not marked "track_never" he will set himself up for lots of pain he
doesn't need.  I concede this is speculative on my part.  But the examples
presented so far have reinforced my beliefs on this.

I greped the serialization library and code and cound 40 BOOST_STATIC_ASSERT
s.  I don't know how many are cases similar to this one but at least some of
them are.  In a number of cases there is BOOST_STATIC_WARNING commented out.
So looking back, I've wrestled with this on a regular basis.  One way
address the concerns who don't want this "help" from the library writer
would be to introdue the concept of a warning level - ignore, warn, error to
be used in the places where these macros are.  Unfortunately, this entails a
whole new concept to be implemented, tested, and documented and I don't see
how I would have time for this.  I'm tying up a couple of loose ends
regarding shared_ptr serialization and then there is the compiler/tool
issues which generate a large number failures.

Robert Ramey