This is a new thread for the topic I accidentally started with Steven. I'm fairly new around here, so please try to forgive me for (re)stating the obvious.
There is an ecosystem of tools that parse poms. They don't use any library we give them, they just parse them. We want old tools to handle new poms without crashing. We'd like those tools to be able to distinguish legitimate extensions from goofs, since some of them are trying to support authoring. This is hard. Retroactively, it may be impossible. However, we do have XML Schema to help us. If tools validate against the schema, they know when a POM is, in fact, valid for its declared model. Thus, any elements that the tool does not recognize are proved to be 'messengers from the future'. I personally think that it is madness to start telling people, 'well, yes, we've extended the expressiveness of the pom, but you have to add special off-to-the-side files to use the new elements.' So, one option we could adopt is to start a propaganda campaign now: "Do you parse poms? Do you tolerate new elements? If not, better fix your code now, because in a few months they will be arriving." After all, in theory, some existing tool could barf on new scopes or any other supposedly compatible change we make. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
