Now that bug 156258 is solved, we can start migrating stuff depending directly on serializer.jar from xalan to the new xalan-serializer package. I know at least openoffice uses it. Currently the split xalan is still backward compatible by including the external serializer.jar in own CLASSPATH and having symlink to it in /lib. That can be removed after every reverse dep is checked. Filling this so it's not forgotten.
Some of the backwards compatibility has now been removed as only wss4j in the overlay, which is now gone, was directly referencing serializer.jar. I still have xalan-serializer as an RDEPEND. I'm not certain if this is necessary but it also adds a degree of backwards compatibility. We'll have to keep an eye out for packages that only require the serializer.
I've discovered that dev-java/ant-apache-xalan2 now fails to emerge (at least in prefixed portage) because it can't find the class org.apache.xml.serializer.SerializerTrace. Adding a dependency upon xalan-serializer and linking in the jar solves the issue. I'm guessing that this is due to the backwards compatibility changes mentioned by James. Should I open a new bug for this issue?
John, please file a new issue as I can't reproduce it here.
Hi James, I filed the new bug (with a patch to fix it) 556584: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=556584 It turned out to be Java 8's stricter compilation requirements. I suspect that you may see similar errors in other packages if they have minimal classpaths.
Presently none of the comsumers of dev-java/xalan can be built with only the serializer. Closing.
