[XML-SIG] Roadmap document - finally!

[Thomas B. Passin]

Lars Marius Garshol wrote -

>
> After going through lots of trouble with mail servers and crashed disk
> drives I've now written the roadmap document (twice) and posted it at
> (once):
>
>   <URL: http://pyxml.sourceforge.net/topics/roadmap.html >
>
> Please have a look at it and tell me what you think.
>
 Thanks, Lars, for doing this.  It's a big service.

I'd like to suggest a few things, and see what people think.  First of all, I
think we need to address testing and especially regression testing.  From
reading various posts lately, it seems like a lot of things pop up, get fixed
in some version on the cvs tree, and later on, who knows which version has
what fixed, or how to prevent it from popping up again.

We would benefit from a good test suite that is easy to run, self-evaluates
the results, contains plenty of regression tests, and makes it easy to add
tests.  Although I know that no one (including me) wants to spend time on
this, once it's accomplished, we should be able to improve the quality of the
results while spending less effort on testing and bug fixing.

I suggest we look at using pyUnit for this.  I only looked at it for a few
minutes, but it looks promising.  It might make sense to use the OASIS parser
test cases as a part of the test suite.

Second, I think the road map should include directions for future work.
What's in there now is mostly finishing up on current work.  What might we
want to get into?  One thing is to keep the standard tools up with newer
versions of existing W3C Recs.  This would include DOM 3, and the new releases
of xpath, xslt, and xpointer.  We did this for SAX2, and surely we will
want/need to do the same for the other key recs.  Let's sketch out these
intents in the Roadmap.

Next in the way of future directions would be important new Recs.  Xml Schemas
would seem to be a prime candidate.  Is anyone working or wanting to work on
py-xml-xchemas?  Can we get some of Henry Thompson's code?  What about an API
for xml schemas? Can we take the lead in that? Or do we not want to (or no one
is personally interested?).  Let's get it into the Roadmap.

Then there are the non-standards things.  Is pyXml going to do anything with
RDF? Topic maps? What else?  Into the roadmap, even if there is no one to work
on such projects at the moment.

Finally, let's add some direction for some of the other efforts that keep
popping up, like miniDOM.  How will it fit into the picture.  We've been
talking about it recently.  Into the roadmap, I say!

I apologise for the length of this post, but there is a lot to think about
here!

Cheers,

Tom Passin