Trying to understand I8N...

[Zeljko Trogrlic]

Vincent Massol wrote:
>>> However, I would rather use 
>>> http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/io/api-release/org/apache/commons/io/IOUtils.html#toString(java.io.InputStream) 
>>> than code it ourselves... Sounds safer, shorter, less maintenance, 
>>> etc to me... :)
>>
>> If it adds value. I think that XWiki is plagued with different 
>> libraries doing the same thing or adding small amount of 
>> functionality. This makes it harder to analyse.
> 
> I'm not I would have used the word "plagued" which has a negative 
> connotation... I would rather have said: "thanks to the effort of others 
> in OSS we have been able to develop XWiki to a level we wouldn't have 
> been able to reach otherwise... This allows us to reduce our maintenance 
> efforts, our documentation efforts and our testing efforts..." :-)
> 
> Now if you notice 2 libraries used in XWiki that do the same thing let 
> us know so that we can all decide if we want to remove one and only use 
> one. I'd be in favor of that wherever possible.
> 
> I've noticed a few places myself where I think the wrong library was 
> chosen IMO (like when we use Jakarta ECS for something completely 
> unrelated). There are also places where the choice was historic: like 
> using ORO when the Regex is now in JDK 1.4 (this has already been 
> identified).

Other examples are Xerces and Xalan, which are also included in JDK. I 
think that you also have duplicate cache libraries. I can take some time 
to analyze this after I finish playing with curernt topic (Kerberos).

Just to clarify: I'm working with SVN so I don't know are all these 
libraries actually distributed.

>> Another place where to avoid local encoding: some source code files 
>> contain French characters, which are messed up on non-8859-1 platforms.
> 
> Ah we need to track these down. Could you please let us know which files?

When I bump into again, I'll drop a message.