[XML-SIG] Problems with PyXML 0.5.3 + suggestions

[Irmen de Jong]

Hello
I've recently jumped in the XML train and I like it! That's why I tried
the PyXML package, version 0.5.3, for my favorite language.
(tried it on Linux 2.2 and Windows NT 4).

However, I've got some problems with it:

1. the xml/parsers/xmlproc/__init__.py file is 0 bytes in size and
   some untar tools under Windows apparently don't like this and they
   skip the file. This renders the xmlproc package unusable because
   Python doesn't see it as a package anymore.
   Suggestion: just add one line "# make this a package"...
   Note: the zero length file works fine under Linux.

2. The prebuilt extensions for Windows are not installed. I had to
   copy them by hand (after a trial-and-error search for the folder
   to place them in).
   Note: works fine under Linux (they are compiled from the source
   and installed in the right folders).

3. The prebuilt PYEXPAT driver (extension DLL) is useless under Windows.
   Why? It gobbles up ALL exceptions, including Python runtime errors!
   I made a little error in my code and no exception was raised, my program
   just went on and produced unexpected (and wrong) output.
   Switching to the xmllib parser solved it all because now the SyntaxError
   occured in my code, and I saw I made a typo!
   Note: pyexpat seems to work fine under Linux.

4. Linux: sgmlop.so is copied in a wrong directory. It's placed in
   site-packages/ and it should be in site-packages/xml/parsers (or
shouldn't
   it? The test scripts and driver code seem to want it there because they
   import xml.parsers.sgmlop...)

5. The new xmllib.py and sgmllib.py modules remain unused, PyXML just uses
   the old and slow modules from the standard lib. xmllib.py and sgmllib.py
   aren't copied over the old versions.

6. xmllib.py is missing a version="0.x" statement.


I fixed some things myself and got it al working (except the pyexpat parser
under Windows) but I felt that I had to report these troubles.
I hope things are fixed in a future release. Keep up the good work.

Cheers

--
Irmen de Jong -- irmen @
                bigfoot.com