[XML-SIG] Putting the pieces together...

[Andrew Kuchling]

I've made a crude first cut at a distribution which packages all the
XML software together.  "make install" doesn't work yet, because it
looks to be fairly complicated, but you should be able to unpack it on
a Unix system, type "make" and have everything compile itself neatly.
This will probably be broken on some systems; please try it out and
report problems.

	The distribution includes pretty much everything we have: saxlib,
xmlproc, sgmlop, pyexpat, and the DOM code.  It's at:
http://www.python.org/sigs/xml-sig/files/xml-package.tgz

	Things that are missing:

	* As mentioned, "make install" doesn't work.

	* The documentation isn't included yet; I want to include 
the HOWTO in various forms, and have to write a Makefile target to
build them all.

	* Should xml.sax.saxutils.ErrorPrinter go to stdout and not
stderr?  Should Canonizer be renamed to Canonicalizer?

	* Where should the C extension modules for sgmlop and pyexpat
be installed?  Inside the xml package tree, or simply where all the
other dynamically loadable modules go?
	
	* What should the various __init__.py files do?  Put another
way, when you do "import xml", what does dir(xml) contain?

	* demo/ directory needs to be documented

	* Test suite needs to be written.

	* What are the licence terms for all the components?  What
should the licence be for the whole distribution?  (Python-style?)

	* The documentation still needs work.

Doubtless people will report other problems and shortcomings.  

My hope is that we can discuss the distribution on the xml-sig and fix
compiling and installation problems fairly quickly (perhaps for 2-3
weeks?).  Once we're fairly satisfied with it, we can make an informal
announcement, people can then start trying to do real work with it,
which will doubtless turn up bugs in interfaces and parsers.  Fixing
those shouldn't require major reorganizations of the package
structure, so the code could be considered beta status at that point.

-- 
A.M. Kuchling			http://starship.skyport.net/crew/amk/
Truth I have no trouble with, it's the facts I get all screwed up.
    -- Farley Mowat