From: Tom Clarke <tom@...2i.com>
Date: 2002-11-08T19:52:31+09:00
Subject: Re: CPAN Style installer

On Fri, 8 Nov 2002, Phil Tomson wrote:

> I believe there is a pure ruby implementation of tar in rpkg (?)

Excellent, I will look into this.

> >Support for parsing the xml from the RAA is crude. I first experimented 
> >with REXML for parsing the data, but I lost patience before it completed a 
> >single parse - having libxml as a dependency didn't seem like a good idea 
> >so I implemeted a crude RegEx based parser that would be sensitive to 
> >changes in format.
> >
> 
> I thought REXML was implemented in pure Ruby?  Why the dependence on 
> libxml?

I didn't ever see REXML complete the parsing of the file - it was too
slow (I never waited long enough), certainly far too slow to be part of
the snappy command line tool of my imagination. I could of course have
been doing something wrong, or stupid. I am prone to such things, 
sans-pair.

-Tom