Hi Elliotte,

On 24.04.2026 13:03, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> 1. Why put this in Apache Commons instead of Xerces?
> [...]> Alternatively if there's not a group of people pushing this, it
> could easily be a one person non-Apache project. Not everything good
> needs to be in Apache.

All three options are acceptable to me. I sent this to Commons because:

- As part of the PMC I have one less people to convince. ;-)
- It is a cross-project concern: Xerces, Xalan and Woodstox cover
different parts of JAXP.

The third option raises a small supply-chain problem: if the answer to
lack of maintainers is to depend on a third-party single-maintainer
project, this might introduce more maintenance problems than it solves.

That said, for the ramp up phase, publishing it as a personal project is
ideal: you can issue releases much faster.

> 2. How many people and how much commitment is there to maintain this
> over time, possibly decades? One person or multiple people from one
> company is not enough. A new project has an expectation of ongoing
> support and maintenance. It's not enough to just contribute some code.


I think this kind of project will reach its intended set of features
pretty soon: I want to provide a simpler configuration of JAXP, not a
more complex one.

After the features are settled, maintenance will only be necessary:

- At each new minor version of the surviving JAXP providers (or major
version of the JDK) if the tests fail for some reason.
- If someone decides to write a new XML parser implementation: highly
unlikely.


> Since it's just one class, it would almost certainly be easier to
> contribute this to an existing project rather than form a new project.

I have no problem contributing it to an existing project, but I would
prefer to keep it as standalone JAR: some projects like `log4j-core`
really don't like external dependencies. It would be easier to convince
the PMC to add a 32 KiB external library than a 300 KiB Commons Lang or
similar.

Piotr

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