From: ser@... (Sean Russell)
Date: 2004-02-14T12:44:57+09:00
Subject: ANN: REXML 2.7.4

Hi,

I've had a busy few months, which is why I've been quiet.  REXML 2.7.4
is available for public consumption, though.  I'm pretty happy with
where it is at with this release; barring any major complaints, I'll
retag it as 3.0 and start development on new features.

Yes, there are still bugs.  I'm hoping to get most of the outstanding
ones worked out before I do the 3.0 tag, and documentation is also
high on my list.  The major new features for the next development
branch are validation, XPath support for the other parsers, and the
ability to hook into native XML parsing libraries if they exist.

Head over the REXML bug page if you have other feature requests or
bugs you want to report.  This is a good time to get requests in.

Here's the executive overview of this release:

* Fix for the XPath descendant* result set ordering bug
* SAX2 listener bug fixes
* Undid a code change that caused a 10x speed regression.  Patches to
  fix this were contributed by a number of people; it is really 
  embarrassing how long it took me to apply the patch, but it is in 
  there now.
* Indentation fixes, and a new word wrapping feature for text nodes
  was contributed by Devin Bayer.  Documentation is forthcoming; for 
  now, see below.

 "Setting :wordwrapping to :all, wordwraps all text nodes longer than 
  60 characters.
  Setting :indentstyle to aString, make aString used as indentation,
  instead of the default '  '.
  And as long as :respect_whitespace isn't set for the element,
  multiline text nodes will be indented."

I've tested this against Ruby 1.9.0, Ruby 1.8.0, and partially against
Ruby 1.6.8  (some of the unit tests require iconv; I'll improve the 
tests a bit later), but I don't anticipate that any of the current 
changes would have affected 1.6.8.


URLS:

The main REXML page (including downloads and documentation):

	http://www.germane-software.com/software/rexml

The Subversion repository development branch is 3.0:

	http://www.germane-software.com/repositories/public/rexml/branches/3.0

The URL for this tag is:

	http://www.germane-software.com/repositories/public/rexml/tags/2.7.4

The darcs repository is at:
	
	http://www.germane-software.com/darcs/rexml

And, finally, these patches have been applied to the Ruby CVS tree, 
so 2.7.4+ is in future Ruby releases.

Whew.