[Opendnssec-develop] XML element ordering in 1.4 vs 2.0

[Sara Dickinson]

On 21 Jan 2014, at 07:12, Jakob Schlyter <jakob at kirei.se> wrote:

> On 20 jan 2014, at 12:28, Sara Dickinson <sara at sinodun.com> wrote:
> 
>> In 1.4, the _ordering_ of elements within the xml files is constrained (see the .rnc definition). However Yuri would like to relax this requirement in 2.0 as it makes compatibility with the new database code much easier. 
> 
> Please elaborate - the ordering is schema-centric, pulling data out using XPath should not have any impact on the ordering. Writing data in the correct order shouldn't be a problem either, but I may be wrong here.

I gather from Yuri that extracting the data from the database structures in a generic way that makes it easy to translate into XML is not actually straightforward…… Of course, we probably could code around it with extra effort but we are trying to take the path of least resistance in 2.0 at the moment to get to something that works with the limited resources we have :-)   So in that context it seems sensible to ask “do we really need it”. 

I propose that for now (in alpha) we live with the change in ordering since it doesn’t actually break anything, but I will open an issue to be reviewed before we go beta to decide if we should expend effort on fixing it. 

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Jerry Lundström <jerry at opendnssec.org>
> 
> Looking at the code I still see that we are generating XML content by hand, why when we already depend on libxml? :(

It is a very good questions, and on the list to ask Rene who wrote the original code. Similar to the above, since what we have works, re-writing it from scratch is a would be nice, but not a top priority at this stage… 

I anticipate a ‘clean-up’ phase for 2.0 where we can address these kind of issues, but at the moment we are concentrating on what is completely missing or not working :-)

Sara.