[Slackbuilds-users] PyXML

[B Watson]

So I was tracking down a build failure in mame, related to a python
script... it turned out that the script would fail if PyXML was installed,
and worked fine without it. So did a little further digging and discovered
that PyXML has been a dead & abandoned project since 2004.

As far as mame goes, I found an easy workaround that allows it to build
whether PyXML is installed or not... but I'm thinking PyXML should
probably go away anyway.

Python itself ships with XML support that was originally based on PyXML,
but the API has changed some over the years. Some stuff that was written
for one will work OK with the other, and some won't...

The PyXML sourceforge page is gone, and you can't find PyXML by searching
on pypi.python.org (though its homepage is there, if you follow the link
from the .info file). Search on google for "PyXML deprecated" and you'll
find lots of distros dropping it from their repos... Debian doesn't ship
it, for instance.

On SBo we have 4 builds that list PyXML as a requirement:

audio/soundconverter
business/openerp-server
network/tribler
python/SOAPpy

tribler is one of mine, I can confirm it build & runs without PyXML
(as well as it ever runs, anyway).

soundconverter seems to behave the same way with or without PyXML
installed: I can't get it to actually open & convert audio files,
and it gives no error message in the UI nor console. Does anyone use
this software?

There's a SOAPpy (python-soappy) package in Debian, that doesn't depend
on PyXML. So it should be possible to get rid of the PyXML dep...

openerp-server, I know nothing about, but found a set of install instructions
for it that doesn't mention PyXML: https://doc.odoo.com/install/linux/server/

If it turns out that PyXML is really & truly necessary for one of these
builds, and we have to keep it... install it to a nonstandard directory,
and patch the stuff that uses it to look there. Adding it to sys.path
at the top of the python script(s) would be enough.