[Exist-development] IMPORTANT package management repository committed to trunk

[James F. <jam...@ex...>]

Hello All,

I have committed the package management repository which lets eXist
now uses expath repository to resolve external dependencies located in
repository to be used by xquery
and other XML technologies. You can add and remove .xar packages from eXist.

NOTE: I have tested pretty extensively but because this is affecting
the core you may have problems so please take precautions and email me
if you need any help

This is a heads up for everyone using trunk which is why I have posted
to both lists.

If you intend to update trunk you will *NEED* to do the following

* rebuild

* place the following in your conf.xml (its in conf.xml.tmpl)

    <module class="org.exist.xquery.modules.expathrepo.ExpathPackageModule"
            uri="http://exist-db.org/xquery/repo" />

I have written up some docs at
http://127.0.0.1:8080/exist/repo/repo.xml which should show you how to
install the functx-1.0.xar package.

Here is some more reference on how to create your own .xar packages.

* expath package:  http://expath.org/modules/pkg/
* expath package spec: http://expath.org/modules/pkg.html

Limitations

* you still need to restart eXist to pick up any changes to
repository, of course we will want to address this limitation of eXist
in the near future so we can have hot pluggable

* the repository is currently outside the database
(webapp/WEB-INF/expathrepo) but we may want to have an option to
create within the database

* we will want to review all the apps/examples/existing libs and pick
which ones are good candidates for converting to .xar archives


cheers, James Fuller