[Dev] Proposal: simplify parcel XML namespaces

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 03:35 PM 6/27/2005 -0700, Ted Leung wrote:

>On Jun 27, 2005, at 2:12 PM, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
>
>>At 01:20 PM 6/27/2005 -0700, Ted Leung wrote:
>>
>>>If we are seriously considering going to a domain specific XML for
>>>0.7, then I don't think its worthwhile to spend a lot ot time
>>>patching parcel.xml.
>>
>>I'm fairly sure I've spent more time discussing the change than I
>>will on implementing it.  For that matter, I will probably spend
>>more time running the tests afterward.  ;)
>
>It's not the amount of time that concerns me, but the amount of churn
>for developers.   My previous comments were not intended as a veto,
>just a mild statement of preference.

Makes sense.  But there won't be any actual churn unless somebody 1) comes 
up with another format, and 2) convinces John it's a good idea.  :)

In the meantime, moving to a "parcel:" format for URIs will help me get rid 
of most of our remaining parcel.xml files, and at least some of the 
load-time overhead associated with them, as well as remove an extra parsing 
pass from the parcel loader.  Right now, implementing the '<namespace>' 
element requires an extra parsing pass, but this pass would not be 
necessary if all parcels have algorithmically-fixed namespaces.

But, I can't get there without first changing the namespaces for all the 
test parcels.  Finally, I'd like the parcel loader to stop requiring parent 
packages to have a parcel.xml in order for a child package to have 
one.  All of these things are a bit easier once the parcel loader doesn't 
need to support arbitrary XML namespaces for packages.