How to approach copying objects with smart pointers as class attributes?

Question

From the boost library documentation I read this:

Conceptually, smart pointers are seen as owning the object pointed to, and thus responsible for de

Answer 1

It's a bit late, but for future viewers: There's a ready-to-use implementation in my header-only library Aurora and its SmartPtr tutorial. With Aurora, it's trivial to implement deep-copy through smart pointers. The following code works for any copyable type T:

aurora::CopiedPtr first(new T);
aurora::CopiedPtr second = first; // deep copy

This makes it often unnecessary to implement The Big Three/Five if your classes have pointer members.