Well, it would be a bit of a busman's holiday if docs are involved, but I am
happy to help if I can.
Ian
________________________________
From: David Bertoni <dbert...@apache.org>
To: xalan-c-users@xml.apache.org
Sent: Fri, 27 August, 2010 19:26:40
Subject: Re: Status of Xalan?
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
