Re: ITP: Xalan-C++
> Is Xerces-C++ already packaged?
>
> Otherwise, you might have to package that, too...
It is. And its packager, Randolph Chung <tausq@debian.org>, is not opposed
to the idea of having a second Xerces-C package based on ICU (which is great
for people looking for consistency of behavior/bugs across platforms).
> From memory, when I last looked at Xerces, it looked so horrible from
> a packaging point of view that I gave up before I even started. For
> instance, it doesn't support automake or libtool, nor do the authors
> understood the usual standards in creating shared libraries:
>
> [620] [snoopy:bam] ~/share/source/xalan/xerces-1.2.0a >ls -l lib
> total 3064
> -rwx------ 1 bam users 3132499 Aug 6 13:17 libxerces-c1_2.so*
> [630] [snoopy:bam] ~/share/source/xalan/xml-xalan >ls -l c/lib
> total 3780
> -rwx------ 1 bam users 2614534 Jul 8 02:53 libxalan-c0_40.so*
> -rwx------ 1 bam users 1242654 Jul 8 04:23 libxerces-c1_2.so*
>
> So, while I really would like to see Xalan-C++ in Debian, you might have
> a few hurdles on the way.
I don't know why these guys make it so painful! I'm not saying that they
should use libtool, but they could make their things work better. I spent a
*lot* of days correcting this same hell in ICU, which now versions libraries
properly on 11 platforms, and basically a lot of other things libtool-like
(like compiling both static and shared at the same time, etc.). The Debian
build, along with all these changes, are now part of the upstream package :)
[Disclaimer: I am a member of ICU's project management committee as well as
an active developer on ICU.] Maybe they could reuse some of this work (ICU
and Xerces both originated from IBM). Libtool doesn't look like an option
since it doesn't work well for C++ and static constructors (on Solaris w/
gcc for example, libtool calls the Solaris linker instead of the g++ driver
to link, and things don't work).
It looks like Randolph did a good job on Xerces-C:
gabier% ls -l /usr/lib/libxerc*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 Aug 2 11:40
/usr/lib/libxerces-c.so -> libxerces-c.so.1.1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 Aug 2 11:40
/usr/lib/libxerces-c.so.1.1 -> libxerces-c.so.1.1.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 948512 Apr 16 2000
/usr/lib/libxerces-c.so.1.1.0
(but there are no static libraries).
BTW Randolph, Xerces is at version 1.3, and a number of bugs in SAX were
fixed in 1.2 and up. Is this something you're going to package for woody?
That would be great? A Xerces-C 1.3 using glibc's iconv(3) and one using
ICU; I can help w/ the latter.
YA
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