Re: Xerces-P and Xerces-C merge by 3.0

[Jason Stewart <ja...@gmail.com>]

Hey,

Since Boris asked some good questions I thought I would give a more
detailed answer. Feedback is welcome.

Cheers, jas.
--

Xerces-P and Xerces-C are merging this mail is to give a basis for
what is happening and why.

The 3.0 release of Xerces-C will now contain the Perl bindings which
are autogenerated from SWIG.

Why Merge?
--

Xerces-P is *not* a seperate project, but instead a set of Perl
bindings for Xerces-C which must be updated whenever the Xerces-C
public interface changes. By keeping the source code contained within
the same project it will be simpler to keep the projects in sync.

By the ASF bylas Xerces-P needs more oversight than it has been
getting over the past few years. By merging projects we can ensure
that for every Xerces-C release the Perl bindings are fully
working. In the past Xerces-P release lagged nearly 6 months to a year
behind each Xerces-C release.

The COM bindings have been included for a long time, but the Perl
bindings have been relegated to a seperate project. In this way all
language bindings can be maintained together.

Finally, it is hoped that we will use Xerces-P to create an integrated
test-suite for all the Xerces-C code.

What is affected?
--

A new directory, swig/, is added at the top level. It currently
contains two subdirectories swig/perl/, for the Perl-specific
bindings, and swig/interfaces/, for the language-independent
bindings. This makes it possible to add future languages alongside the
perl/ directory.

The swig bindings add 12M to the codebase. The pre-merge codebase size
was 103M, after merge it increases to 115M.

Here is a comparison of the top-level directories:
32M     Projects
828K    config
4.7M    doc
408K    lib
496K    m4
168K    obj
8.1M    samples
404K    scripts
46M     src
12M     swig
4.7M    tests
3.5M    tools

So for example the Projects/Win32/ and Projects/MacOS/ directories are
nearly 3x larger than the current swig bindings.

The Xerces-P Perl bindings are *not* built by default. To build
Xerces-P you must cd into the swig/perl/ directory and follow the
standard Perl module build procedure.

Roadmap
--

The code has been committed to SVN and is working.

The build procedure for the Perl bindings should build libxerces.so if
it has not yet been built (currently you must first build libxerces
and then build the perl module).

The current Perl test suite needs to be expanded to include all
important components of Xerces-C

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