xml-dev - Re: SAX 1.0beta

[Peter Murray-Rust <peter@ursus.demon.co.uk>]

Having wasted some of DavidM's valuable time I have just (I hope) debugged
a problem due to clashing versions of SAX. This may just be a transitional
problem (i.e. gone tomorrow when everyone has converted to SAX1.0beta), but
it may also need some formal addressing by parser writers. (Nothing here is
judgmental!)

I have recently been trying to get a distribution for JUMBO2 which
interfaces with several parsers (at present AElfred, DXP and Lark, though
the limit is simple my time to test others). Having constructed these I
discovered weird bugs which bit me late and night and did not give up. I
have finally tracked the reason down to the fact that:
	- DXP distributes a version of org.xml.sax, which is not compatible with
the final release SAX10beta.
	- DXP was ahead of SAX in my classpath.
The loader therefore picked up this incompatible version.

The question, therefore, is how should parser developers distribute SAX?
The DXP strategy is self-contained and therefore useful if someone is just
using DXP, but it has this possibility of tricky interactions. Should we
encourage packaging of SAX or parallel downloading? Should we have
versioning within SAX that is machine-checkable? I am sure there are
experts in this field.

	P.

Peter Murray-Rust, Director Virtual School of Molecular Sciences, domestic
net connection
VSMS http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms, Virtual Hyperglossary
http://www.venus.co.uk/vhg

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