Re: XML idea

[richard]

On 6 Jan 2004, at 21:29, Alex Perez wrote:

> On Tue, 6 Jan 2004, Pete French wrote:
>
> > > There's no reason that a wrapper for NSXMLParser could be written 
> > > which
> > > could then be distributed with MPWXmlKit. NSXMLParser is an SAX-based
> > > parser ONLY though.
> >
> > I rather meant the other way round - GNUstep needs an implementation 
> > of
> > NSXMLParser somehow, does it not ? As I said, I dont like it, and it
> > has a lot of problems apparently, but in terms of keeping all the bits
> > in GNustep Foundation that are to be found in Cocoa Foundation its
> > necessary :-(
> This is exactly what I was referring to. I think you misunderstood 
> what I
> meant. the GNUstep team has a policy of keeping XML stuff out of (or at
> least totally optional in) GNUstep-base. The wrapper should be 
> distributed
> with MPWXmlKit.

I'm a bit confused by this ... GNUstep-base has had XML support built in
for years.  It's optional in that it depends on libxml2, so it's not 
there if you
don't have libxml2.  It also builds standalone as part of the base 
additions
library, so you can use it on systems where you don't have the base
library.
I think we *do* have a policy of not depending on any
external libraries if we can possibly avoid it, but XML support in base 
is
standard and was there well before Apple added their version.

So ...
SSL support depends on openssl and is not built if openssl is not 
available.
XML support depends on libxml and is not built if libxml2 is not 
available.
Various characterset support depends on iconv and is not built if it is 
not available.

I don't know about how others feel, but I think these standard features 
are
sufficiently important that it might be worth making the configure 
process
bomb out if the necessary libraries are not found (at present it just 
displays
warnings) and have new configure options to let people force 
continuation
without the facilities if they really want to.