Re: [xml-dev] find with XPath over file system

[James Youngman]

On Fri, Jan 28, 2005 at 05:50:10PM +0000, Frans Englich wrote:

> Will this be -- or already is -- merged into the standard package, and will 
> over time find its way into the distributions?

I haven't even looked at it yet, let alone thought about that very
much.

If it did get included, it might be included as a separate binary,
"xfind", which would be exactly like "find" except that it would
support the -xpath test.  The reasoning behnd this is that findutils
is a pretty fundamental part of a GNU/Linux system, and so the package
should probably not depend on a whole load of XML libraries, scheme
interpreters, etc.   

That means that having a single set of source build two separate
binaries might be a workable alternative.  

Another - probably better - way of achieving this would be to devise
some kind of "plug-in" architecture which allows you to implement a
test in a dynamically loadable library.  That would also allow the
-xpath stuff to be in "find" without making the relevant package bring
in a load of other stuff (instead the -xpath extension package would
depend on the basic "findutils" package).  The code for "find" is
relatively straightforward for this, but it's the sort of design task
that it's best not to have to re-do several times.

I suspect that I would go for the plug-in apprach.  However, that is
orthogonal to the issue of whether the code would be included in the
main GNU findutils package.

Regards,
James.