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

[Yoshinori Okuji]

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

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

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

[1] http://www.erp5.org
[2] http://wiki.erp5.org/HowToCreateBusinessTemplates
[3] http://wiki.erp5.org/HowToCreateBusinessTemplates
[4] http://cvs.erp5.org/ERP5Type/patches/XMLExportImport.py
[5] http://cvs.erp5.org/ERP5Type/patches/ppml.py

YO
-- 
Yoshinori Okuji, Nexedi CTO
Nexedi: Consulting and Development of Free / Open Source Software
http://www.nexedi.com
ERP5: Full Featured High End Open Source ERP
http://www.erp5.com
ERP5 Wiki: Developer Zone for ERP5 Community
http://wiki.erp5.org