Marc van Grootel wrote: > > Today we encountered an issue with the installation of add-ons for XXE > 4.2.1. We haven't upgraded to 4.4.0 yet. We have a couple of dependent > add-ons that where always installed from www.xmlmind.com (Batik toolkit, > FOP and DITA). I looked in the download folder on your site and saw that > only for 3.8.1, 4.3.0 and 4.4.0 there are add-on zips and corresponding > xxe_addon files. > > I have now taken our 4.2.1 dependencies and provide them locally > (putting xxeVersion to 4.2.1+). I also did a compare and saw that some > add-ons are not really new but only have xxeVersion element changed to > 4.4.0 which means that our 4.2.1 users could not see them anymore. > > I understand that in some cases an add-on is strictly tied to an XXE > version because it may use features of that new version. But if that is > not the case why not flag them as x.y+ so that they may be found > independent of the XXE version?
An add-on which contains compiled code will always be tied to specific XXE version. Using something like xxeVersion=x.y+ is very risky because there is no way to guarantee that you'll not have link errors[*] with a future version of XXE. > > I don't mind providing some add-ons locally because that removes the > dependency on the xmlmind site but it would be kinder if for all > released versions there would be an .xxe_addon file that points to a > usable add-on version, especially since a default installation will have > http://www.xmlmind.net/xmleditor/_download/list-${XXE_VERSION}.xxe_addon > as a default download location. > For economic reasons, we cannot keep all versions of all add-ons on www.xmlmind.net. We keep there the add-ons for the two latest versions. (Add-ons for v3.8.1 will vanish in the near future.) We keep all versions of all add-ons on www.xmlmind.com. However, our add-on archive is not automatically used by XXE to save network bandwidth. You'll find all the add-ons you need here: http://www.xmlmind.com/archive/xmleditor/ More specifically, you'll find v4.2.1 add-ons here: http://www.xmlmind.com/archive/xmleditor/4.2.1/ In practice, you need to replace: http://www.xmlmind.net/xmleditor/_download/list-${XXE_VERSION}.xxe_addon and http://www.xmlmind.net/xmleditor/_download/list.xxe_addon by: http://www.xmlmind.com/archive/xmleditor/4.2.1/list-4_2_1.xxe_addon in your copy of XMLmind XML Editor (Options|Preferences, Install Add-ons section, "Download add-ons from these servers" list -- See http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/_distrib/doc/help/com.xmlmind.guiutil.PreferencesEditorDialog.html#installAddonsOptions). --- [*] With Java, link errors may happen the first time you use a piece of code in the add-on and not necessarily the first time you use the add-on. --- PS: It is also possible to create your own add-on archive. No need to have a web server for that. A shared folder suffices. See "Search add-ons in this directory" in http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/_distrib/doc/help/com.xmlmind.guiutil.PreferencesEditorDialog.html#installAddonsOptions
