“Packaging”

Hello,

At Declarative Amsterdam this year, Adam Retter gave a compelling talk
(EXPath Pkg Version 2) about the possibility of doing some sort of
packaging work.

We’ve talked about this a few times, in at least a couple of different
contexts. I think we’d all agree that Maven, NuGet, NPM, pypi, etc. are
a significant part of their respective communities.

It would be good if we had something like that too. It’s a very large
undertaking and solving that problem is absolutely out-of-scope for us.

However…

Could we spec out the bare minimum needed to support some sort of
packaging for XQuery and XSLT? (This is related to, but probably
distinct from xsl:package packages; the fact that there’s going to be
overlap there is just an unfortunate reality.)

I’m motivated to bring this up now both because it would be better to
have the hooks in place if/when some future packaging standard takes
off, and because we might allow vendors to leverage the mechanism in
non-standard ways in the short term.

I’m also thinking about all of the functions we’re seeing proposed. I
fear the list of useful functions we could standardize is endless and
we’ve already reached a point where it would be challenging to
articulate a principled account of when we do or do not standardize
fn:usefulthing.

My naïve, I’ve spent a whole 10 minutes thinking about this, story goes
something like this:

Suppose a query could begin with

   some-syntax-for-packages "array-extensions"

and that would make a family of array extension functions available
(perhaps even in the fn: namespace) or

  <xsl:some-syntax-for-packages module="cryptography"/>

and that would make a family of cryptographic functions available.

Vendors could roll their own with the expectation that when an
interoperable packaging standard is available, they’ll support that too.

I dunno. But it feels like we’ll regret it if we don’t make the hooks
available.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

--
Norm Tovey-Walsh
Saxonica