[ANN] alpha release of XMLgawk available

Hello,

The initial alpha release (xgawk-3.1.4-2005-04-09)
of the XMLgawk project is now available at SourceForge.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/xmlgawk/
https://sourceforge.net/project/sho...group_id=133165

If you have the Expat XML parser installed on your
host, XMLgawk will use it. The configuration script
will even detect Expat automatically if Expat's
header file is visible to your compiler (otherwise
use the --with-expat=PATH option).

Since Andrew Schorr has encapsulated the XML extension
into a loadable module, XMLgawk has become more of an
extensible gawk that is packaged with an XML extension
(as well as the other test extensions that are included in
FSF gawk 3.1.4). For Cygwin users (but also for users of
other OSs), it is still possible to have the XML extension
linked statically into the executable (use the
--enable-static-extensions option).

Stefan Tramm has supplied a library which allows the Expat
XML parser to read character encodings which would otherwise
be unknown to Expat (e.g. Japanese euc-jp / sjis, Korean euc-kr,
and similar Windows-specific Japanese encodings).

I have not yet updated the manual to reflect these changes.
We are quite confident that this alpha release runs stable
and is portable because we have spent much effort into
porting and testing it on SuSE Linux 9.2, Solaris 8, MacOSX
and Cygwin.

We have also clarified the relationship between the xgawk
releases of the XMLgawk project and the FSF GNU Awk releases.
The xgawk releases are based on the official gawk releases
and will track them as a base. Arnold Robbins, the official
maintainer, has been encouraging us to experiment with new
features along a parallel development path from the regular
gawk. We are in touch, and occasionally submit small patches
for acceptance into the main release. It is an agreed-upon
but otherwise not overly defined long-term goal that many or
most of our larger-scale changes will eventually also find
their way into the main gawk distribution.

In the meantime, we work and experiment with Arnold's blessing;
our intent is not to "fork" gawk, but rather to provide
ourselves and anyone else who wishes to join us with an awk-based
testbed for new ideas.

In fact, Arnold sees this as an excellent example of Free
Software at its best; users taking an existing Free Software
item and extending it to meet their needs, unconstrained by
anyone else.