[XML-SIG] Roadmap document - finally!

[Lars Marius Garshol]

Tom: thank you for this posting. You managed to start a discussion of
lots of issues that I've wanted to see discussed for quite a while now.

* Thomas B. Passin
| 
| 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.

I certainly agree with this. As you can see from the roadmap I plan to
improve the SAX test suite to ensure that it is well tested.

xmlproc already has a good test suite. I don't believe anything more
is needed there. 

javadom has an acceptable test suite, which, BTW, can be applied to
any Python DOM implementation. Doing this might be a good idea. The
test suite could be larger, but for something as seemingly little-used
as javadom it probably is not worthwhile.
 
| 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.
 
This is what test_javadom uses and it worked very well for that test
case. This also has the benefit that PyUnit is already in the
package. :)

For some test suites, however, PyUnit is not suitable. The xmlproc
tests use a homespun set of scripts because most of them parse an XML
document and produce some output that is then compared with the output
from a baseline run. PyUnit is not very suitable for this. (There are
some API tests, however, that are tested with PyUnit.)

So the question is, I guess, what is there that needs to be improved
about the current test suite? The SAX tests for sure. Do we need a
description of how to run it and how to add new tests? Does the suite
need tighter integration?

| 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.

I agree with this, though I also agree with Martin that it might be
confusing if we do this. So if we do, let's make sure that the text
leaves no doubt that these are wishes for the future rather than
planned work.
 
| 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? 

Not me. If I wanted to do something like this I'd start with Hook,
RELAX and TREX, in that order.

Other than that I agree. If we can agree that we want it it might be
useful to list it as an open task.
 
| 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.

I think RDF and topic maps are both outside the scope of the XML-SIG.
Neither are really XML standards.
 
| 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!
 
If there is anything that needs to be done about minidom, then, yes, I
think it should go in.

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

There sure is. :)

--Lars M.