Hi everyone.
In response to yesterday's meeting, here is an ordered list of
prioritized tasks for XML work:
1) Current AI manifests are not easy to use.
Deals with Manifest inter-file organization.
Needs to be sorted out first.
2) AI's multiple parsers present unneeded complexity and unmaintainability.
Which parser. Needs to be figured out sooner rather than later.
3) AI manifests need to be forward and backward compatible between builds.
Compatibility needs to be built into the schema and manifest. How
this is done will impact other parts of AI.
4) Semantic validation is needed for AI
While important, this can be done as a bolt-on check, in which case
it won't impact the rest of the installer code except for calling it.
(Note, it could also be done inside the installer code, but there are
issues of redundancy which make this a poor choice IMO.)
5) AI manifests have validation holes
This deals more with the structure of the Sysmap Manifest (formerly
criteria manifest). Since this deals with a change in format which will
impact code only superficially from what works now, it can be figured
out later.
Note: yesterday I was thinking of combining (5) with (1), but (5) is
very specific and deals with certain fields of one manifest, whereas (1)
is more general. These don't seem to fit well as a single task to
describe in a specification.
Comments welcomed.
Thanks,
Jack
