Re: System properties

/ Vasil Rangelov <boen.robot@gmail.com> was heard to say:
| The p:system-property() function seems to look a lot like the
| system-property() function of XSLT 1.0. However, once thing I've always
| missed in it, and was fortunately added in XSLT 2.0 was xsl:product-name. I
| believe XProc should learn from the things that were added then and use them
| from version 1.0. Meaning to add the following system properties:
|
| *	p:product-name, a string containing the name of the implementation,
| as defined by the implementer. This should normally remain constant from one
| release of the product to the next. It should also be constant across
| platforms in cases where the same source code is used to produce compatible
| products for multiple execution platforms.
| *	p:product-version, a string identifying the version of the
| implementation, as defined by the implementer. This should normally vary
| from one release of the product to the next, and at the discretion of the
| implementer it may also vary across different execution platforms.
|
| Existing system properties also need some clarifications. To be more
| precise:
|
| p:episode 
|
| Returns a string which should be unique for each invocation of the pipeline
| processor.
|
| What is the format of the string? Implementation defined or are there some
| constrains? The XSLT 2.0 specification for example specifies the format of
| generate-id() as
|
| The unique identifier must consist of ASCII alphanumeric characters and must
| start with an alphabetic character. Thus, the string is syntactically an XML
| name.
|
| p:version 
|
| Returns the version of XProc implemented by the processor; for processors
| implementing the version of XProc specified by this document, the number is
| "1.0"
|
| While this seems pretty much clear, it should be added (quote from the XSLT
| 2.0 spec again):
|
| The value will always be a string in the lexical space of the decimal data
| type defined in XML Schema (see [XML Schema Part
| <http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt20/#xmlschema-2>  2]). This allows the value to be
| converted to a number for the purpose of magnitude comparisons.

That all seems reasonable.

| I also suggest a new property called p:platform or something like that which
| would return a string containing different information about the environment
| the XProc implementation is running on. The exact content should be
| implementation defined for security/privacy reasons. A very typical use case
| would be implementation that has several language bindings. In this case,
| this string could contain the name of the language to which the
| implementation is bind to. It could also show OS, available RAM and CPU and
| other cheesy stuff. Most of what would be really useful for this property
| (and also what is most likely to be implemented) could also be used in
| p:product-version though, so I don't feel very strong about it.

I'll run this by the WG.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> | Everything should be made as simple as
http://nwalsh.com/            | possible, but no simpler.