[Xmlunit-general] Some XMLUnit2 discussion items

[Stefan B. <bo...@ap...>]

This is a list of issues to resolve before we can seriously work on
implementing XMLUnit2, it will ceratainly be incomplete but we can
tackle them as they occur.

I'll list the issues along with my take on them.

>From the top of my head:

* which Java/.NET version should be the baseline?

Java5, .NET 2.0

I'd love to use C# 3.0 even if it just was because of lambdas, but
right now I feel requiring .NET 3.5 would go too far.

* package/namespace names?

net.sf.xmlunit

* which pieces of XMLUnit for Java 1.2 do we want to support?

diff, validation, xpath

I'm personally not interested in dealing with non-well-formed XML,
there are other libraries that solve this well.

The node tester stuff may be interesting but I'm not convinced that
DocumentTraversal is the way to go.  I have some ideas on providing a
Hüet Zipper for the DOM tree which may make things easier here.
Anyway, I'd like to defer that.

Anything XMLUnit2 doesn't do will still be available from the legacy
jar.

* do we want to provide a legacy DLL for XMLUnit.NET?

No.

* do we want to change the license?

I'd be open for a couple of licenses ranging from MIT over Apache
License version 2 to Mozilla or Eclipse but don't see any pressing
need to change the current Apache License 1.1.

I won't accept any form of (L)GPL, no point in even starting a
discussion on that.

* branching - who will be trunk?

There are two options: create a branch for XMLUnit 2 and keep the
trunk at XMLUnit 1.x or create a branch for XMLUnit 1.x and develop
XMLUnit2 on trunk.

I'd go for XMLUnit2 on trunk.

* switch to a different VCS?

Now that sourceforge supports git, mercurial and bazaar do we want to
move away from svn?  I'm on the fence here.  I'm a darcs user and have
been for years so I'm quite familar with the benefits of distributed
VCS over svn, I don't see them apply to XMLUnit's current situation,
though.

If we wanted to use a different VCS, I have no preference for either
of the three hosted at sourceforge as I haven't used any of them
myself.

* which documenation format?

Two years ago I wanted to use LaTeX but went with docbook after some
people on this list said it would be more likely I'd get patches for
docbook.  I never received any patches for the documentation at all,
so I could as well go straight to LaTeX unless I hear good reasons not
to.

* which build system for the .NET version?  NAnt or Visual
  Studio/MSBuild?

I'd keep NAnt support for the folks using Mono but would be OK with
additional VS solutions as long as the NAnt build is kept in sync with
it.

Stefan