Has Saxon changed in the Oxygen lib dir, breaking plugins?

[martindholmes]

Hi there,

I noticed today that the bleeding-edge (testing) version of the TEI plugin cannot do its normal TEI ODD to RNG transformation in Oxygen 21.0. I think this is because the transformation as configured is expecting to find saxon9ee.jar in the Oxygen lib directory, but it no longer seems to be there.

Is this change a permanent one, and of so, which Saxon should we be pointing at, and how do we handle the fact that on different Oxygen versions we need different versions of the transformation?

Cheers,
Martin

[Radu]

Hi Martin,

You mean this bug, right?

https://github.com/TEIC/oxygen-tei/issues/30

Indeed we changed the name of the Saxon 9 library bundled with Oxygen to "oxygen-patched-saxon-9.jar". About the same for the Saxon 6 "saxon.jar".
What is the current libraries list you have in the transformation scenario from your plugin?
In the TEI framework bundled with Oxygen the libraries list for "TEI ODD to RNG" is:

Code: Select all

${oxygenHome}/classes/

${oxygenHome}/lib/oxygen-basic-utilities.jar

${oxygenHome}/lib/*resolver*.jar

${oxygenHome}/lib/*xerces*.jar

${oxygenHome}/lib/*saxon*9*.jar

${oxygenHome}/lib/*saxon*6*.jar

${oxygenHome}/lib/xml-apis-ext.jar

${oxygenHome}/lib/log4j.jar

The support for wildcards in library paths was added in Oxygen 18.0 so if you want to have the scenario work also with Oxygen versions older than 18.0 you probably need to create an union between the libraries which used to work in Oxygen versions prior to 21.1 and the new libraries.

Regards,
Radu

[martindholmes]

Hi Radu,

I'll let Council know and ask them again what they want to do about the plugin and support for older versions.

Cheers,
Martin

[Radu]

Hi Martin,

Maybe I've mentioned this before or maybe it's a new idea I have but maybe the TEI community should not provide an entire TEI framework (along with actions, CSSs, transformation scenarios). Maybe it should provide a framework which just comes with the latest RNG schemas and adds an XML catalog which resolves them. That framework would not have TEI-specific association rules but it would have high priority so that its XML catalog would be used before the XML catalog from the TEI framework which comes already bundled with Oxygen. So Oxygen's bundled TEI framework would handle the editing and publishing part but the validation would be done through the RNG schemas provided by your framework.
There is still a problem with the publishing though, your framework ideally would also provide the XSLTs and ANT build files for publishing, meaning that our framework's transformation scenarios would need to delegate to your framework's bundled XSLTs and ANT build files. I don't think I have a solution for this yet but maybe it's something we could think of on our side.

Regards,
Radu

[martindholmes]

Hi Radu,

Our problem is that the schemas and stylesheets are all interdependent, so both validation and transformation scenarios would have to be updated. The whole thing is a bit difficult to disentangle.

I think we're going to stop supporting versions before 18.1, and use the wildcard approach.

Thanks,
Martin