After a great holiday, I’m now gearing up to have a busy year with this project and at work (I’ve been approached to start porting some old Amiga games across to Interactive TV Formats.). I’m currently building the CVS source tree and getting the build to work under various platforms. I’m tackling the configure/build basics of linux-x86, cygwin, mingw, linux-alpha and hpux. I’ve found the following links very useful.

http://www.gnu.org/manual/automake-1.6.1/automake.html
http://www.gnu.org/manual/autoconf-2.53/autoconf.html
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/automake/2002-05/msg00071.html

I’m also agonizing over whether or not I should abandon my long worked on MetaWrap XML library and swap in the Xerxes library instead and get instant support for many of the available standards. I’m so close to getting schema working in my lib, but I’m thinking of biting the bullet and making a sensible decision, made all the more possible by MetaWrap being made GNU GPL now. using Xerxes would allow me to concentrate on other things. Xerces will continue to be maintained for a while and is rapidly becoming the best of breed XML parser. I would loose some of the features that made the metawrap xml library unique, as far as soft validation and auto repair of badly formed XML. The only real issue is license compatibility, which I think is going to be OK. It will take longer to remove and replace the existing MetaWrap XML library, and the MetaWrap XML library is much smaller. On a plus side, by the end of the process, I will be an expert in Xerces. The MetaWrap XML library is by far the oldest and ugliest part of the system and it would need an overhaul anyway. Hmmmm… – James.