Question

I’m building a program that uses the following Boost headers (I’m using Microsoft Visual C++ 10),

#include <boost/filesystem.hpp>
#include <boost/date_time.hpp>
#include <boost/property_tree/ptree.hpp>
#include <boost/property_tree/info_parser.hpp>
#include <boost/filesystem.hpp>
#include <boost/foreach.hpp>
#include <boost/thread.hpp>

Now apparently the program only needs library binaries for date_time, filesystem, regex, system and thread.

However, I am getting a link error looking for the serialization library.

LINK : fatal error LNK1104: cannot open file ‘libboost_serialization-vc100-mt-gd-1_44.lib’

I have two questions:

1. What header file above requires the serialization library?
2. Where can I find a list of headers that require binary libraries (along with which library they are associated with) and which ones are header-only? I have looked for quite a while and can’t seem to find it.

Answer 1

1. It’s possible that either Boost.PropertyTree or Boost.DateTime are asking for the libboost_serialization. Both Boost.PropertyTree and Boost.DateTime libraries support integration with Boost.Serialization, so one of them could be requiring that the serialization library be linked. My money’s on Boost.PropertyTree, because the above link for date/time specifies that you must explicitly include the serialization headers to get support for it, so it’s unlikely that Boost.DateTime would need the serialization library unless you include those files.

2. Here’s a list of those Boost libraries which support automatic linking, so they require linking to library files. Here is the list of header-only libraries. I’m not sure if the union of both sets forms the whole boost library, but it seems pretty complete.