XML, Python, XML-SIG, documentation, PyXml, 4

[andrew cooke]

I was hoping to do some quick + dirty XML manipulation using Python,
but I'm having a hard time working out exactly what is available, what
is maintained, and where the documentation is.

The web pages at http://pyxml.sourceforge.net/topics/ seems to be out
of date.  In particular, the download talks about 0.6.6 when at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyxml there's a version of PyXml at
version 7.0 from December last year.  Also, the documentation at
http://pyxml.sourceforge.net/topics/docs.html is terribly incomplete.

Looking on the XML-SIG mailing list, there seems to still be activity,
with discussion of PyXml and 4Suite (http://4Suite.org and
http://sourceforge.net/projects/foursuite/).  There seems to have
documentation in the sourceforge download area.

Which of these packages should I use, and what documentation will help
me, if I want to:

- automatically generate a tree from the XML file (I believe this is
related to the DOM)
- supply a class to some (already existing) tree walking code that
does local rearrangements of the XML data
- automatically generate an XML file from the modified tree

(I've already looked at XSLT and I don't believe that is the right
tool for this kind of job).

Also, I know that it's boring updating web sites, and that this is all
a volunteer effort, but the current XML pages are not very useful.  It
would be less confusing to simply point people to the mailing list
archives, rather than to incomplete HOWTO documents that were last
changed years ago.  Perhaps the links to the sourceforge pages would
be useful too.

Thanks,
Andrew