Thanks for your feedback. Here I am trying to clarify some points; don't take them as a reaction to a flame (your message is not a flame), but simply as a statement of what the situation is now. Your point of view as a user is important, and it would be very helpful if you could elaborate on how you would like Xerces to be presented to users like you.
At 10.04 27/04/2005 +0100, Andrew Wilson wrote:
Having been silently watching this mailing list for a long time, I now need to move from Microsoft's own code to something more cross platform. I am developing using VC7 on a Win XP machine. On investigating the apache xml web site, 2 things immediately strike me.
1) The release information appears to have hit a brick wall last autumn/fall (2004-9-29 to be precise). That is the last date on the Release info page. Things were going strong with many updates per day until then, then nothing. Since I monitor this mailing list, I know that's not true, but to someone coming fresh to the site, that is the impression.
The web page should be clearer on this: the list is titled "Release Information of Xerces-C++ 2.6.0", as that is the list of bugs/enhancements that have been shipped as version 2.6. It is not a daily report of the commits.
The rule is that the web is updated every time a new release is out, with material regarding only that release; there is then the mailing list for asking help/proposing changes ([email protected]), a mailing list that broadcasts the commits done in CVS ([EMAIL PROTECTED]), and a bug tracking facility (http://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/BrowseProject.jspa?id=10510)
2) As some recent posts on this list have indicated, the method of implementing on a standard (?!) windows platform is not clear from the apache xml site. I guess this is where most of the new users are likely to come from. The installation for the Windows platform is flagged as Windows NT/2000, long gone now. The impression this gives is wrong. Surely most people are Win XP for development. Although most developers probably will know about the command line, it seems very retro in this age of GUIs. If xml apache wants to appeal to the largest population of installed systems, I would expect a simple click to download and instal some working samples for Win XP users.
The Win32 platform listed on the web is NT because that is the machine used to build the Win32 binaries (to be precise, the binary that can be downloaded from the Download page has been built using "Windows NT 4.0 SP5 compiled with MSVC 6.0 SP3". As Xerces-C++ is just a library, that binary package works also on Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows 2003.
What you ask is (I think, but correct me if I am wrong) an installer that creates an entry in the Start menu and maybe adds the include and lib directories to the environment; but apart from a "Documentation" entry, what should be listed there? Samples are command line based, and invoking them is useless without specifying an argument. Should it contain a link to start the MSDEV IDE (btw, which one? VC6, VS2002, VS2003, Borland)?. What else?
Thanks, Alberto
All of the above is meant as a helpful comment, not a flame. I prefer to work on Macintosh, and I started in computing when punched tape was the norm. I just had to purchase and use a WinXP system for a recent development which needed XML, and I now want to broaden things out.
I feel that there has been a renewed surge of enthusiasm and interest in apache xml, and the impending move to version 3 will signal that the implementation is much more rounded and useable. There are postings to this list nowadays on usage issues rather than just bug fixes, and that's a good sign.
D ^ D Andrew E Wilson < A > AV technology consultant (UK) D v D Tel +44 7710 727636
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