Hi all,

As some of you know I'm actually the xerces-perl maintainer - but
since xerces-perl is built using SWIG (swig.org) to auto-generate the
Perl interface from Xerces-C, I'm very dependant on the Xerces-C code,
so I also participate here as well.

Since Xerces-perl is *so* dependant on Xerces-C, we began discussing
moving it from a standalone project to a *sub-project* of
Xerces-C. Now that Xerces is a TLP at apache, I believe the time is
ripe to continue this discussion.

The reasons for doing it are as follows:
* Xerces-P is not indepenant - it simply exposes new features produced
  in Xerces-C to Perl users in a perlish way.
* Xerces-P needs more oversight - I am the only active committer on
  the project, so all code decisions are made by me with little or no
  review
* I believe the scripting language API for Xerces provides a really
  convenient test framework for writing unit tests for Xerces. I don't
  know how much of Xerces-C is covered by unit tests, but I do a lot
  in Xerces-P, and I wish I did a lot more. Perl's test harness is
  very powerful and flexible, making it easy to write tests and
  execute them.
* The SWIG interface files used by Xerces-P are now language
  *independant* - this means that any scripting language supported by
  SWIG (14 at last count) could use the Xerces-P codebase and generate
  their own wrappers - that would mean more projects besides
  Xerces-Perl (Xerces-Python, Xerces-C#, etc). I have approached the
  current maintainer of the Python wrapper for Xerces and Xalan,
  PIRXX, to see if he is interested in this idea, but I have not heard
  back from him.

The consequences of changing would likely be:
* p-dev mailing list would remain as is
* SVN code could be migrated to maintain a language independant
  codebase (the SWIG interface files) and a language dependant
  codebase the Perl out from SWIG.
* Help from Xerces-C committers to oversee code changes for
  Xerces-perl
* Moving of the Xerces-P website to be a sub-site of Xerces-C??? 

Let me know your thoughts.

Cheers,
jas.

PS. Here are the current list of languages supported by SWIG:

* Tcl 8.0 and newer versions.
* Python 1.5 and newer.
* Perl 5.003 or newer.
* Guile 1.3.4 and newer. 
* Java JDK 1.1 and newer.
* Ruby.
* Mzscheme. 
* PHP
* Objective Caml (Ocaml)
* Pike
* C# 
* Chicken scheme compiler
* Allegro CL
* Modula-3 

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