Hi, I am currently working on research how to improve XML parser in YaST. What we have nowadays is libxml2 based c++ parser ( that almost noone use directly ) and XML module ( module as a code, not YaST module :). I check usage of XML module and main usage is data to XML and back ( with variant xml as string or xml as file ). There is just two additional functionality. One is checking xml error ( almost noone use it ) and setting metadata for generated xml ( bad API as it should be part of that data to XML method ).
So my question is what we would like to have better? One thing for sure that hit us often is optional schema validation ( as some XML is prevalidated like control files for products of roles, but autoyast is user generated/written ). Also some nicer error reporting would be nice because current XMLError method is almost never used (and yes, you should read nicer as using exception that can/have to be catched otherwise it report popup with internal error and not cause some strange error later ). Do you think that it makes sense at all to have own module as ruby, perl and also python, for whose we currently have bindings, all have own good ( good as better then our ) parser. So does it makes sense to have own XML parser beside backward compatibility and for new stuff as already seen on some places just use rexml or nokogiri that e.g. already have support for relax ng validation[1]? Or do we have some functionality that we would like to have on top of standard parsers? Only thing that current parser have on top of generic xml parsers is understanding of type attribute that do automatic type conversion so `<a type="boolean>true</a>` is returned as `true` and not `"true"`. But this magic is also source of some bugs as e.g. hash does not have this type attribute and result is that `<a><key>b</key>c</a>` is returned as `"c"` and not hash, which cause many recent failures we get with typos in autoyast profiles. And as bonus we do not specify this types in schema, so during validation if you omit type it is still valid xml, but it crashes in code as it expect different type. I would welcome any suggestions or ideas how your ideal xml parser should look like. Thanks Josef [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/913489/how-do-i-validate-xml-via-relax-ng-in-ruby/933482 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: yast-devel+unsubscr...@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: yast-devel+ow...@opensuse.org
