[XML-SIG] XML in Python 1.6 (PROPOSAL)

[Fred L. Drake, Jr.]

Uche Ogbuji writes:
 > Unless someone has done substantial work on a driver to create a
 > DOM from a SAX parser (4DOM's won't do as they aren't up to the
 > latest Sax2 yet), I'd say we leave this out until Python 1.7.

  I'm expecting Lars to provide SAX 2 support "out of the box" for
Python 1.6.

 > I think we should continue to put all XML things in the xml package.  Why 
 > muddy the waters?  Why can't the PyXML package just know to add its extras 
 > into the existing xml package?

  The catch is that *requires* that PyXML either be installed on top
of the Python distribution (since the xml package can only exist in
one place in the directory tree), or that it include all the standard
portions of the xml package.  I'm not real happy with either
approach.
  Another possibility may be to have PyXML provide a package
"xmlextra" (or whatever), and xml.__init__ can check for it's presence
and "incorporate" it somehow:

------------------------------------------------------------
try:
    import xmlextra
except ImportError:
    # not present
    pass
else:
    # add new subpackages
    __path__.append(os.path.dirname(xmlextra.__file__))
    del xmlextra
------------------------------------------------------------

  There are two problems with this approach:

  1.  The packages/modules provided by xmlextra are importable by two
      names: xml.<foo> and xmlextra.<foo>.  I'm not entirely sure how
      much we should care about this one.

  2.  Old versions of xmlextra may be installed in a user's (or
      application's) private area, but a more recent version of
      Python's standard xml package is installed (with a more recent
      version of Python).  Again, I'm not sure how relevant this is,
      but it does offer potential breakage.


  -Fred

-- 
Fred L. Drake, Jr.  <fdrake at beopen.com>
BeOpen PythonLabs Team Member