Embedding xsd schemas

[andrew-hardin]

There's a fair amount of brittle book keeping required to track the location of schemas and resolve them at run-time. An alternative approach involves embedding the schemas into the source (e.g. xxd -i schema.xsd), then at run-time passing those buffers to the xml validator.

Is that a feature that may be valuable to the broader community? If so, is it a feature that replaces the existing schema path machinery, or, does that path based machinery enable a valuable use case that I'm ignorant to? If so, it probably makes sense to maintain the existing schema paths for backwards compatibility.

[JDanielSmith]

Yes, the schema-path machinery is a bit complicated; I like the idea of embedding a schema! But this probably needs to get run through "the process" (although I'm not sure exactly what that might be) as an enhancement.

This probably isn't possible in a standard way unless/until std::embed/#embed is accepted.

[andrew-hardin]

I see where you're going with std::embed. That certainly would be a clean way to bake a resource into the binary. However, using CMake's configure_file could also get you to approximately the same destination -- using the build system instead of a built-in compiler feature. I'll try to mock up a proof-of-concept to demo the idea.

[JDanielSmith]

I think we still need to support waf builds :-(, so a CMake-only solution probably won't work.

[andrew-hardin]

The waf requirement is unfortunate. The CMake-only option isn't too bad, and the resulting .h/.cpp are surprisingly clean: andrew-hardin@e3f396a