[MathDOM]Packaging MathDOM, patching lxml

[Stefan B. <beh...@gk...>]

Hi!

I changed the subject to help finding it on the mailing list.

Jeff Kowalczyk wrote:
> I'm curious to try MathDOM on my Gentoo Linux system. Idly curious, I d=
on't
> have any real math tasks to use it on, but I planned to at least packag=
e up
> MathDOM for Gentoo as a result of the experimentation.

Sure, go ahead :) I already noticed it's been packaged up for Darwin/Mac-=
OS,
and I'd really like to see it in other places.


> Thanks for writing it.

Was for my own needs, but it's grown bigger. :)


> Could you clarify the web page documentation regarding whether your pat=
ch:
> http://mathdom.sourceforge.net/bigfat.patch has been, or will be, accep=
ted or
> rejected upstream by lxml's maintainers?

A smaller part is in lxml-0.8 (released yesterday), so I'll release a new
patch against that version soon. Other parts are still pending but most o=
f it
will be merged into lxml's SVN fairly soon, I hope.

The patch is a rather big collection of single patches, so it will take s=
ome
time until all of them are accepted and merged. None has been rejected so=
 far
and there are actually people using them so it's likely that they will be
accepted in one way or another.


> It also isnt stated whether this patch (and a rebuilt lxml) is required=
 for
> MathDOM to use lxml (over pyxml), nor if the patch has side effects not=
iced by
> other lxml-using programs.

No side effects were found so far, but I guess that's mainly because thos=
e
that are there conform with the intention of lxml (heading for ElementTre=
e
conformance). Most of the patch adds additional (independent) functionali=
ty.

While you can use MathDOM with PyXML (that's intended), the PyXML version=
 does
not currently support XSLT and RelaxNG validation, so I encourage all use=
rs to
stick to the lxml version. No XSLT support means no support for Presentat=
ional
MathML export and the like, so that's a rather big draw back. Literal ter=
ms
are equally well supported in both versions.

If you like, you can make distinct packages, one that excludes
mathml/lmathdom.py and does not depend on lxml and one that excludes
mathml/mathdom.py and does not depend on PyXML. Even the tests should wor=
k
since they test for the availability of both modules. I hope I took enoug=
h
care to make the rest only depend on the Python stdlib.

I may consider changing setup.py to check for their availability, too. Th=
at
would make it easier for maintainers to split up the package. If you do t=
hat,
I'd really appreciate it if you provided both packages, though.

If it fits the package naming convention, you may call them

python-mathdom-lxml
and
python-mathdom-pyxml
and the complete package
python-mathdom

or something in that line.


> Gentoo ebuilds make it easy to add patches to the build process. If the=
 patch
> is already accepted by upstream lxml, or is just a generally useful pat=
ch, I
> could add a USE variable and the conditional patch to dev-python/lxml-0=
.7. They
> may not accept it into mainline portage, but it would be there in
> bugs.gentoo.org for any who were interested.

Right, Gentoo 'gen=E8re tout' (generates everything - french) :) - longes=
t OS
installation ever :) So I guess separate packages would be the way to go.=
 I'll
include that in the CVS version, so you can be the first to test it... :)

Stefan