Internationalization of EXPath Package titles

[Joe Wicentowski]

Hi all,

Tony Graham raised a good question:

> The EXPath Packaging System spec (http://expath.org/spec/pkg) allows only one <title>, and that <title> can contain only a string, so there doesn't appear to be a way to, e.g., have either multiple <title> or multiple things inside one <title> and select between them based on xml:lang value.

(The eXist community tracker now has an issue assigned to this. See
https://github.com/eXist-db/exist/issues/1306.)

Of the two possibilities Tony suggests:

- allow multiple <title> elements with different @xml:lang
- allow a new element inside <title> which would contain the
language-specific titles

Which would be most desirable?

Joe

[Joe Wicentowski]

Hi all,

I'd like to open a discussion about improving the EXPath Package spec [1], which is used widely in the eXist community [2].  Several areas are in need of improvement, from my perspective:

- The current version was written before Semantic Versioning 2.0 [3] was released and should be updated to align with this standard. 

- Dependency versioning constraints should be more flexible and expressive, accommodating notions like those used in other package managers like npm's "semver" [4]. 

- The current spec has no support for internationalization. It should be extended to support language-specific package titles, for example.

The spec would then need to be implemented.

On a somewhat related note, I have started an XQuery library for parsing, comparing, and sorting SemVer 2.0 version strings [5].  If there is interest, it could be developed into a library that itself is distributed as an EXPath Package. 

I would welcome your ideas as well as suggestions about how to approach this spec revision!

Best,
Joe

[1] http://expath.org/spec/pkg

[2] https://exist-db.org/exist/apps/doc/repo

[3] https://semver.org/spec/v2.0.0.html

[4] https://docs.npmjs.com/misc/semver#versions

[5] https://gist.github.com/joewiz/b349e2853a17bf817e5d0013d01fa9f9