[XML-SIG] problems with PyXML 0.6.3

[Martin v. Loewis]

Hi Michael,

Thanks for your comments.

> Shouldn't the installer remove or rename the existing _xmlplus dir
> first?

Unfortunately, the installer is based on distutils, which does not
provide such a capability. Patches are welcome, of course.

> xmldoc/README says it's "v0.6.2"

Thanks, it will read 0.6.4 in the next release.

> xmldoc/README could note that if you've just run an installer,
> you don't have to do any of the "python setup.py ..." commands.

Ok, I added such a comment.

> xmldoc/test:
>     Either xmldoc/README or (new file) xmldoc/test/README should tell you
>     how to run the tests in this dir (`python testxml.py -g', I think),
>     and how to interpret what happens.  Similarly for subdirs.
>     Maybe tests should be run automatically on installation.

Not sure about that. Perhaps I should add a note that the tests should
*not* be run, unless you know what you do. Contributions of more
elaborate documentation would be welcome, of course.

>     I had 2 tests fail:
>     test test_sax crashed --
>         exception.SystemError : 'finally' pops bad exception

That is a serious bug of pyexpat in 0.6.3 on Windows, which basically
means that the Windows distribution is useless. It was subsequently
fixed with the pyexpat.c in the Python and PyXML CVS.

>     test test_saxdrivers crashed --
>         exceptions.IOError : [Errno url error] unknown url type: 'c'

Not sure about this one. It might be a problem with drive letters and
urllib.

> xmldoc/test/dom:
>     When I tried `python test.py', I got "Error in syntax" right away.

I hope that we'll get an update to this code soon, so there is
probably no need to investigate it further.

> When I ran one of my DOM programs, I got this exception:
>         from xml.dom.Node import Node
>     ImportError: No module named Node

Yes, xml.dom.Node is gone. Why did you need to import it? If it was to
get at the node type constants, they live in xml.dom.Node now.

> When I tried removing the ".Node" from the import statement, the
> program ran as before, so apparently that is the fix, but shouldn't
> this be noted fairly prominently in xmldoc/README or
> xmldoc/README.dom?

Contributions of documentation are welcome. I'd rather not maintain a
change log of all API changes; having the current state of the API
documented somewhere would be good, though.

> xmldoc/doc/4DOM/index.html has links to ../PACKAGES.html and
> ../README.html, which do not exist.

Again, with the next 4DOM update, this might look completely
different.

Regards,
Martin