Re: xpath 3.1 implementation activity

Hi Joseph,
    Thanks for your thoughts.

I hope to work on doing the activity of writing Xalan-J W3C XPath 3.1
test suite driver.

I'll share the details about this, on this list when I've made
progress on this activity.

On Sun, May 24, 2026 at 11:34=E2=80=AFPM Joseph Kesselman via dev
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> The old test driver uses a mix of ways to invoke tests, since some of it =
tests the language (with input samples and expected output) and some of it =
tests our APIs. It also has hooks intended to allow running it against othe=
r processors. When we started work on it we were one of the first groups to=
 write an XSLT regression test suite; I think we had one before the recomme=
ndation committee did.
>
> I haven't looked at what they've done for 3.1; I don't know how hard it w=
ould be to drop that into our framework.
>
> NOTE: Our current framework relies on being driven by Ant, and has a lot =
of ad-hoc code, including using Tidy as a basic HTML parser for serializer-=
sensitive tests which should be compared semantically rather than byte for =
byte. It does the job but as part of keeping it portable to other processor=
s (including those written in other languages) it is moderately ugly. Writi=
ng a new test driver might be worth considering, but we would need to estab=
lish whether and how testing other implementations is still required. It wo=
uldn't be a huge task, probably less than my Maven effort, but doing it rig=
ht is nontrivial. If you are going to consider a new test driver, you might=
 want to spend some time resolving that, and at least understanding what co=
ncerns went into xalan-test so you don't repeat some of the mistakes we mad=
e along the way.
>
> If we *can* make a portable test suite Someone Else's Problem, pointing t=
hem to an unmaintained copy of the old xalan-test, that might let us simpli=
fy things substantially.
>
>
> --
> Joe (Typo'ed on my phone.)
>
> Car Talk has been advised that the staff opticians, C. F. Eyecare, are no=
w under new management. It's Ike and Zeke Leary, now; Lorraine is gone.



--=20
Regards,
Mukul Gandhi