[XML-SIG] Re: [4suite] ANN: 4Suite 0.9.1

[Martin v. Loewis]

> Is it time to reopen this discussion?

Certainly, yes.

> The Python XML-SIG really "owns" the "xml" Python package namespace and
> we don't intrude on it without its permission.  DOM moved there for
> obvious reasons (it's now the official full DOM of the SIG).  Earlier
> this year the decision was made to move xslt and xpath there as part of
> initial moves towards incorporating them into the xml-sig package but I
> think concerns over their cross-platform compatability are holding up
> outright adoption.

Could somebody please summarize what these concerns where? I
understand to fully build 4XPath from source, you need BisonGen,
bison, flex, SWIG, ... what else? This is indeed an impressive list of
prerequisites, but I can't see anything inherently platform-dependent
in it.

Since 4Suite 0.9.1 comes with these files prebuilt, it can't be too
difficult to adjust the PyXML build procedure to also assume they are
generated.

Would patches to the build process be accepted? It seems that it
should be easy to get at least SWIG out of the picture, by properly
changing BisonGen. In the long run, I wish Python had a standard
parser generator so the dependency on Bison could be removed; that's
beyond reach at the moment.

Does anybody think it is funny that you need EBNF parsers in XML tools?-)

Regards,
Martin