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  • Hacker News
  • Love it! More please!
  • this is great! xmlppm was big part of xml study which did years ago and which uses expat for parsing xml; was first fond memory of expat / keep up great work
  • That's good. Every country should do something similar.
  • What’s happens after 6 months?
  • nothing. its a 10 year old project. i guess they'll stop receiving funding from Munich? thats about it.
  • That's a great question!
    by spyc
  • Related discussion of the maintainer stepping down from libxml2 support. libexpat is a different library of course.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283196

    10 months ago | 119 comments

    Also related:

    https://xkcd.com/2347/

  • One thing XML is very good for is semantic documents adhering to a well defined schema - and it's one of the few commonly used text-based data storage formats that do it well (with XSD, DTDs are pretty terrible). Unfortunately the only library that currently implements validation is libxml2 - expat is way nicer, but it never supported it. I don't understand why most XML libraries do not implement validation - XML sucks as a plain data storage format anyway.
  • I had a good experience with DITA based tools when writing technical documentation a few years ago, and there are enough graphical tools for a Word like experience.
  • > PS: If anyone managed to combine Clang-based MinGW with AddressSanitizer and Wine without crashing at launch, please show me how and drop me an e-mail. Thank you!

    It's for problems like these that I have been working at cross and native Windows support in the Nix ecosystem

  • I'm curious. Do you have more information?
  • > The City of Munich follows the principle of Public Money, Public Code: Whenever possible, software developed in-house should be released as open source. The goal is not only to ensure the city’s own IT security but also to enable others to reuse the software securely, transparently, and in a traceable way.[1]

    [1] https://opensource.muenchen.de/security.html

  • https://opensource.muenchen.de/sabbatical.html

    > The Open Source Sabbatical is intended to provide professionally qualified software developers with the opportunity to work on an open source project for a limited period of time in order to improve it.

    > This sabbatical is not only open to employees of the City of Munich, but also to external software developers.

    So cool. Congrats to Sebastian!

    by wxw
  • Thanks for highlighting. I just realized this is open to developers who aren't city employees, which is unique. A city can pay a vendor for a deliverable, but paying an outside individual to improve something the city doesn't own is interesting (to say the least)
  • The longer background is that Christian Ude our mayor until 2014 furthered the LiMux[1] project - migrating more than 14000 PCs in public administration to Linux.

    He got personal visits from both Ballmer and Gates that pressured him to stay with Microsoft[2] but did not balk.

    Unfortunately his successor caved to Microsoft's siren song abolished LiMux and Microsoft got a nice campus in the city (they used to be at the outskirts).

    Since May this year we have the young and energetic Dominik Krause and there is hope for change again.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

    [2] https://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgaben/2019/10/interview-2/

  • Why would you want/need change when it comes to OS of choice in the public administration?

    If you personally prefer Linux then you should install that. Maybe I’m not understanding the impact of one over the other in this scenario or if it’s a long historical gripe thats shared between many Munich citizens?

  • > Unfortunately his successor caved to Microsoft

    Corruption unfortunately also happens in Bavaria as this can be seen.

    Thankfully Merz is not affiliated with big business at all ... oh wait, nevermind. (One reason why public opinion about him has totally downed. That, as well as his age - old people are often really a bad choice for politics, we can all see this in the USA right now.)

  • I have very little hope in Krause. He is just a populist and an opportunistic politician without much substance behind.

    Personally I couldn’t care less which operating system the city chooses to use as long as it helps to save costs and increase efficiency. Bureaucracy is extremely high and ideology driven, permissions take too long to be granted and populist projects are taking money away from families and their young children (Kindergarten contributions are through the roof).

  • By "balk" did you instead mean "budge"? Or am I misunderstanding what you meant?
  • LiMux was such a hopeful project.

    Let's see whether times truly have changed with the reckless US administration and the total dependence on closed source US software.

    Maybe Europe will finally truly wake up.

  • "Microsoft got a nice campus in the city" - plus they decided to pay taxes (Gewerbesteuer) in Munich rather than Unterschleißheim, despite Munich having a higher rate.