If I may add my comments to this topic... as a user-non-developer of Xerces
I think that backward compatibility is a nice goal, but in practice, even the nicest intentions lead often to deficient backward compatibility. Also, backward compatibility of APIs is not as critical as backward compatibility of behavior. In my case, upgrading between Xerces has always been a piece of cake in terms of compilation (API compatibility). The worst appears when trying to run our test suites. Generally, each upgrade causes at least a few hours to fix things here and there, in obscur areas, that generally relate to namespaces declarations, schema validation, or xpath compatibillity between xerces and xalan. I just tried the latest build (sept 24th) of xerces, and again, I would have to spend some times to figure out why it breaks our tests. Errors are here again related to namespace declarations and xpath failures (Things worked perfectly in 2.1.0) Anyway, it may be better for me to wait until the release of 2.2.0 as this nightly build may be a "bad build". Important note: This is not a complaint about Xerces. I really like the technology. This is just a comment about the concept of backward compatibility in general. Claude Montpetit --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
