XML Support for Penlight?

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

Hi all,

Obligatory 'Sam Roberts' notice: I look after Penlight, which is a set
of general Lua libraries aiming to cover most common needs - all in
pure Lua with only a LuaFileSystem dependency for the file handling
modules; the operative word is 'general purpose'.

Now the question is this: I've received a few feature requests for XML
support in Penlight, and I'm wondering what collective wisdom feels
about basic pure Lua XML read/write support being included. Generally
I've felt that this is the job of LuaExpat and friends, but this does
seem to be a core need these days. (There is already support for
common config file formats like INI etc.)

One candidate for inclusion is LuaExpatUtils, which works with LOM
representation and provides pretty printing, derived from the Prosody
project.

What is the general feeling? Where is the boundary between 'general'
and 'specialized' Lua libraries? [1]

Note: I have been cutting down on excessive module interdependencies,
so XML etc support would be completely optional - i.e. you don't pay
for what you don't use.

(I still feel that things like networking, databases, GUIs etc are
better served by separate projects.)

steve d.

[1] Yes, I know the question is badly posed.