[Adonthell-devel] XML data files

[Kai Sterker]

According to what we discussed before [1] I've started implementing
writing game data in XML format. That should mainly be used by our
editors, but it will also mean that we can edit stuff manually where
no editor exists yet or is not completely finished.

With a little utility like convert_data.py [2] , we can easily convert
between gz-compressed and xml-formatted data files. (Regardless of
that, there's still filereport.py [3] to view the contents of
gz-compressed data as plain text).

In course of doing those changes I've noticed that all of a sudden
modules other than base where depending on libxml header files, so
I've started refactoring stuff to avoid this. I've got things to
compile, but the XML stuff isn't working yet and some test scripts
remain broken. I could run diskiotest though, meaning the
gz-compressed data I/O was still working properly.

Not sure how much time I can spend on that over the weekend, but there
are a few more things to do:
* fix problem with XML-writing and complete XML-reading.
* detect absolute path names when reading gz-data and don't try to
locate them in Adonthell's search path.
* add search path lookup to XML-reading.
* little bit of cleanup and polishing.

I guess that there might have to be more changes once somebody
actually uses that stuff (I'd like to continue work on questedit if I
find the time, so I can see if it will work for that).

Kai


[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/adonthell-devel/2006-06/msg00007.html
[2] 
http://cvs.savannah.nongnu.org/viewcvs/adonthell/test/convert_data.py?root=adonthell&view=markup
[3] 
http://cvs.savannah.nongnu.org/viewcvs/adonthell/test/filereport.py?root=adonthell&view=markup