[Alephmodular-devel] Preferences Update - library choice: expat

[Br'fin <br...@ma...>]

Ok, I've managed to change a couple niggling things on the AM side of 
the preferences now that it's been decoupled from the file structures. 
Next up is serious setup and integration of a XML - Plist based 
preferences reader/writer pair.

I am not going to debate preference file formats. I believe PList is a 
fine format. And should be fine cross-platform since I don't intend to 
use Apple's APIs for working with preferences. Sure it's an OSX native 
format with most of the tools for working with it being OSX Only. But 
it's also a workable XML format, and at least there are tools to work 
with it.

For XML Libraries, I'm less decided. It looks like A1 uses expat. And 
from some reading up on expat, it appears to be a fine project with a 
good pedigree.

This will also be the first existing other project to be used within AM.

*looks at something*

Now isn't that interesting. expat itself is not distributed as a 
library per-se. I wonder why that is? Though I should imaging putting 
it's own home directory into a versioned directory and directing XCode 
to look for the external files there would still be appropriate.

We need to make decisions like this sooner, just because work on the 
preferences will depend on the external code.

-Jeremy Parsons