On 8/24/2010 6:55 AM, Martin Baute wrote:
Hello all,
what is the status of the Xalan-C project?
To be quite honest, from the outside it looks like this project has more
or less been abandoned:
* The last release (1.10.0) is five years old, and
* depends on an equally-old Xerces-C version, and
* when using ICU for localization, it breaks with ICU>= 4.x (ref.
XALANC-702).
* (Sidenote) Several links on the project website are broken (as far as I
can see, all links that should point into the Jira).
I am maintaining several software projects that rely on Xalan / Xerces for
XML processing, and ICU for Unicode support. Right now, I keep compatible
with Xalan by not updating. The problem is clear:
* OS update -> new GCC
* new GCC -> build of ICU 3.x breaks -> new ICU
* new ICU -> build of Xerces-C breaks -> new Xerces-C
BUT:
* new ICU -> build of Xalan-C breaks -> NO NEW XALAN-C AVAILABLE.
At the bottom line, my question is: Is there something I overlooked, like
some post-1.10.0 release of Xalan-C that I simply missed, or a new Xalan-C
release just around the corner?
Or should I start looking for an alternative to Xalan-C because this
project is defunct?
I have been very busy with work and life, so it's been hard to
contribute like I did when IBM was essentially paying me to work on
Xalan-C. It would be great if some poeple out there who need things to
get moving would help out.
I think you'll find the trunk of the SVN repository is up-to-date and
more stable than 1.10.
As for using the ICU, the only thing that's broken is using the ICU as
the message loader. You can certainly use ICU integration for everything
else. This can be accomplished by using the -t icu -m inmen option for
runConfigure on the Unix/Linux platforms, and by using the Xalan.dsw
Visual Studio projects and building the "Debug with ICU" or "Release
with ICU" options. There is no added value to using the ICU as the
localization option, since there are no localizations for the Xalan-C
messages, and the only advantage to using the ICU message bundles are
multiple languages in a single message shared library/DLL.
As for doing a Xalan-C release, the actual knowledge of how to do that
has been lost with people leaving the project, so if someone would like
to help with resurrecting the process, that would be great. My suspicion
is the only difficulty would be generating new docs for the web site.
Dave
