RFC: Dropping ASCII XSL formatter

[Francis J. Lacoste]

Hello all,

We currently have two ASCII formatters:

1- One in perl using XML::Parser
2- One XSLT stylesheet.

I propose we drop the XSLT stylesheet which outputs ASCII report. There
are no advantage to using XSLT over perl to format ASCII. It only adds
to maintenance. Also XSLT isn't as powerful as perl to play with
strings, so ASCII output format is a lot of work.

If we didn't require a perl only ASCII formatter that would be another
story. But since we want our users to be able to install Lire and get
ASCII reports without having to install xsltproc, we might as well keep
only the perl ASCII formatter.

Besides, the perl formatter is faster than the XSLT one for big reports. 
(That's because the perl formatter uses a stream model where XSLT uses 
DOM. This means that XSLT has to parse the whole XML report before
formatting it whereas the perl formatter formats as it parses the
document.) 

Any objections?

-- 
Francis J. Lacoste
francis at Contre.COM
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