Attila:

I've just started using Rhino in the last couple of months, and I've
wondered about project direction.  It's really exciting that you're
working to help set/develop one.  So, enough flattery -- on to the
details. :)

First, your "major" points:

As for #1, I may be able to help "give the world a better E4X support
in Rhino," slowly. I've been hacking around just a little bit to fix
showstopper E4X bugs in my local copy of Rhino.  I can take a more
comprehensive look through it.  I've thus far been pursuing a patching
strategy, so I'm really not analyzing where the XMLBeans dependencies
are, and thus I do not know how much work it would entail to replace
them.  I agree that replacing them would be ideal -- someone
contributing to the project ought not have to learn the XMLBeans API,
for example, and distribution-wise it's cumbersome (and the
documentation mentioning the dependency was wrong, as I recall --
specifies only xbean.jar and not the jsr173_1.0_api.jar).  But removing
XMLBeans calls has not been the strategy I've pursued thus far, and I
intend to continue with patching for the moment (fixing some of the
bugs has been very simple, and others might be).

I decided to start by running the e4x test library on Rhino 1.6R2,
which produces a horrifying number of errors (59 failures in 187 tests,
including several that I aborted because they appear to enter infinite
loops).  But I can say that I've been able to use even the existing E4X
support productively, albeit with some-to-much working-around.  I've
only run into a few of the bugs, none that I would rate critical.  The
one that's been most difficult to work around is 320812, and the most
embarrassing is 290715 (I think I have a local fix for this).

As for #2, I see no reason to continue JDK 1.1 support.  I don't know
of anyone using JDK 1.1 anywhere, myself.

I don't have anything to add on the "less major" points for the moment,
except that it's not clear when you think R3 might be, but it's
unlikely I'll make my way through much of the E4X backlog before it
happens, unless it's going to take you a while to get through Bugzilla.

Back to work,

-- David.