On 2/22/2011 10:33 PM, Phillip Kellogg wrote:
Dave,
Thanks for your reply. That doesn't sound good that the project seems to be
more or less dead. Out of curiosity, how much time would you expect it take to
get xalan back on track? Is there any sort of metric available as far as how
much xalan is used? Does the current svn head for xalan work with the latest
xerces? What future do you see for xalan?
Hi Phil,
I would expect it would take a fair amount of time, but more
importantly, it would require people to step up and become committers.
That's always been the sticking point, as people have volunteered to
help, then disappeared. At this point, after 12 years, I don't have the
time to do the work to resurrect the release process and to update our
build system.
To answer your specific question:
1. I believe Xalan-C is widely used. I often see in pop up in commercial
products I use.
2. The head of the repository works with the latest Xerces-C and is even
backward compatible with Xerces-C 2.8.x. It has numerous bug fixes and
enhancements.
3. Unless there are people who are willing to step up and contribute,
Xalan-C will remain a stable XSLT 1.0 processor. I don't think there's
much of a future for implementing XSLT 2.0.
Since xalan is built on top of xerces would getting the processes from the
xerces project be a good starting point to get xalan back on track?
Much of the Xerces-C infrastructure could be adopted, but it would
require almost as much work to modify it for Xalan-C as it would to just
re-write it.
Never having participated in an open source project I am unfamiliar with how a
project works in this environment. With that said I may be interested helping
with this project but would like a little better idea on the sort of commitment
that would be involved.
People can contribute as much or as little as they want. Once someone
has been contributing for a while, they can be nominated for committer
status, and become an official member of the project. It's also possible
for people to simply work on discrete pieces, such as updating the
documentation or updating the build system.
Dave
