[Development] Replace QtXml backend

[Thiago Macieira]

On Friday 24 July 2015 15:26:30 Gerhard Scheikl wrote:
> Hi
> 
> Unfortunately, the QtXml classes contain a lot of bugs and are not really
> maintained.

Hello Gerhard

Your question is answered mostly by your paragraph above: QtXml is in Done 
state, so we really don't want to do major surgery in it, which could open the 
door up for subtle incompatibilities.

I'm not even talking about introducing bugs that aren't there. That's sure a 
concern. But even if you do your best, you may *fix* bugs that people are 
accidentally depending on; or the simple fact of a change in behaviour could 
result in existing code getting broken.

Are you prepared to accept all of those reports and react to them?

> So we came up with the idea to replace the back-end with Xerces and try to
> leave the Qt API part the same.

That's interesting.

How big is Xerces? How easy is it to build? How is it licensed?

> If we succeed, we would like to give this code back to the community and
> replace the current QtXml classes.

Do you include accepting maintainership of the module and reacting to bug 
reports in "give this code back to the community"?

We're all for new and improved code, but when it comes with a large 
maintenance burden, we have to analyse whether it's worth the hassle.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center