> I don't want to sound too negative here. Xerces-C++ has served the world > well, was pioneering in its time, and will continue to serve its existing > users > for time to come. But I think we also need to be honest and realistic about > the status of the project today, and let it be retired with grace.
I agree with everything you wrote, and have since I obtained committer status out of necessity. As you surmised, I am forced out of necessity to keep things semi-viable (and that's overstating my view of current state) because of my software stack, which is being redesigned to move all of the XML processing to Java and eliminate all C/C++ dependencies (Xerces is by no means unique in regard to the lack of maintainers). I do not expect that will happen rapidly, and the EOL for the old software is likely many years out unfortunately, but once it's purely legacy then it becomes a matter of risk management to decide how fast to get off of it since any catastrophic bug simply means it's EOL out of necessity overnight. It is not, and has never been, an "insult" to say the project should be retired. It's a matter of simple honesty to the community to acknowledge it. I feel, BTW, exactly the same about the Java version of Xerces, but let's not even go there. -- Scott
