XML export/import is cool! (Was Re: [Zope-dev] Deprecating XML export/import?)

[Jim Fulton]

Yoshinori Okuji wrote:
> On Friday 24 March 2006 17:33, Andreas Jung wrote:
> 
>>>>- it has no maintainer, nobody wants to touch it without gloves
>>>
>>>Is that any more true than for lots of other things?
>>
>>Right, but for duplicate functionality that is not widely used and that I
>>consider buggy it is legitimate to propose the deprecation. But as usually
>>I am open to good arguments :-)
> 
> 
> We have been using XML export/import with ERP5[1] in many production systems 
> for a long time. Only this feature allows us to understand changes among 
> different versions in a human readable format, and even to edit the contents 
> by ordinary text editors. Without this feature, it is nearly impossible to 
> work on large systems in a distributed way. XML export/import is so valuable 
> to make a bridge between TTW development and distributed development with the 
> technology Business Template[2,3].
> 
> To make the feature more convenient, we have locally developed some monkey 
> patches[4,5] to Zope so that:
> 
> - the output is more stable (i.e. the order of tags and the reference numbers 
> are more stable) to make "diff" usable for human

I did quite a bit of work along these lines for Zope 3.  Perhaps
we can find a way to share the Z2 and Z3 code.

> - unicode objects work fine, assuming that data should be encoded in UTF-8

I think the Z3 xml pickle code handles Unicode too.

> We would be happy to submit our patches, if you think they are generally 
> useful.

Perhaps first, we should try the Zope 3 version of xml pickle.

Jim

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