[pfligersdorffer]

I pushed some of the changes that I had done prior to renaming into little-archive to a separate portable-binary-archive branch. That branch is ready to be pulled back into the upstream portable_binary_archive branch.

Portable archives now run all unit tests successfully with the exception of serializing a user defined primitive type. This is no surprise as it must fail at this time. Polymorphic portable archives face some more difficulties that need to be looked into. In addition the code has become simpler and classes reside in boost namespace.

[gennaroprota]

@pfligersdorffer: Before I look into it, is this still relevant?

[pfligersdorffer]

@pfligersdorffer: Before I look into it, is this still relevant?

I think so, haven't changed anything since!

[gennaroprota]

I’m closing this PR: the branch it targets, portable_binary_archive, was abandoned in 2017 and is now 358 commits behind develop, so merging into it would not get anything into a release.

The code would also need some work before it could go into develop. It includes boost/spirit/home/support/detail/math/fpclassify.hpp, which no longer exists, and it uses a detail header of Program Options for UTF-8, which would make the serialization library depend on Program Options. The standard library has std::fpclassify() since C++11, and the serialization library has its own UTF-8 conversion.

If you’d like a portable binary archive in Boost.Serialization, please open an issue first, so that we can agree on the design, as, once released, its format has to be supported forever.