Re: [boost] [serialization] Doc problems

From: Robert Ramey (ramey_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-09-09 10:52:08

It's become clear to me that users of the serialization library are of at 
least two kinds.

a) those who use archives included with the system.

This would be analgous to a user of say a transform_iterator who no interest 
about how its constructed but just wants to use it.  He doesn't need to know 
how its implemented.  He just needs to know the requirements on its type 
arguments and the operations it supports.  This is the intent of the Archive 
Concept section and I believe that it fullfills this role.  I see no problem 
in refining it along the lines of this recent discussion.  I might note that 
no one up to now seems to have had too much difficulty in using the library 
at this level, so although I don't mind making the changes, I don't think 
its going to affect things very much in the scheme of things.  Of course, it 
might be that not that many people use the package at all and that's the 
reason I don't get complaints on this.  Its very hard to know.

b) those who wish to make thier own archive.

This is different and much smaller group of users. It would be analogous to 
those how want to make new iterator using the facilities of the new iterator 
library.  This requires much more than than just type requirements of some 
of the classes.  I made a family of dataflow iterators so I know first hand 
about this.  This is the intent of the section "Archive Implementation". 
Having a clearer idea of the role of this part of the documentation will 
permit me to improve this as well.   One could say "Given a clear and 
unambigous Archive Concept",  design of a particular model (archive class) 
is an implementation detail.  And for most users it is.  But for users 
wanting to make their own archive, I want to better describe how to use the 
included classes.

Matthias Troyer wrote:
> On Sep 9, 2005, at 3:04 AM, Robert Ramey wrote:
>
> FWIW, I've tried to code a few archive types over the past year and
> reading the documentation alone was not sufficient. I had to look at
> the source codes of your archives to see how to actually write an
> archive. This should not be necessary.

Did you manage to make any new archive types?

Robert Ramey