I've been thinking about how we consume Xerces and Xalan, especially since we've had to do some of the more recent modifications to the build scripts to manipulate the JARs and archives in various ways. As an alternative to grabbing the binary packages, we could grab the source code itself and do our own builds. We could do this by grabbing the officially distributed source archives or we could checkout the code directly via svn:externals pointing to release tags (some risk in that).
One advantage this has is that the code would be compiled at the bytecode level of our code (Xerces currently builds to support Java 1.3). The other would be a more natural fit into the classlib module structure, which would allow us to build and package manifests as well as additional tests. Just something I've been knocking around in my head. Any comments or additional thoughts?
