Bug 844533

Description of problem:

For Fedora 18 we're trying to get rid of PyXML in the distribution[1]_.  The reason is that PyXML has been dead upstream for a long time and it has the dubious behaviour of overwriting the python stdlib's xml module with its own code.  The combination of these two means that code that uses the stdlib's xml module can sometimes be broken by installing the PyXML package (because of old bugs or old code in PyXML that hasn't been ported to newer python versions).

I've taken a look at spacewalk-backend-tools which has a Requires: PyXML and found two places that PyXML/the stdlib xml module is used, both in unittests:

./satellite_tools/test/testxmlparser.py:from xml.sax import make_parser, saxutils
./satellite_tools/test/testxmlparser.py:from xml.sax.handler import feature_namespaces
./satellite_tools/test/testxmlparser.py:from xml.unicode.utf8_iso import utf8_to_code

./satellite_tools/test/testxmlwriter.py:from xml.sax.saxutils import escape
./satellite_tools/test/testxmlwriter.py:from xml.unicode.utf8_iso import code_to_utf8
./satellite_tools/test/testxmlwriter.py:import xml.sax.writer

Of these, most of the API being used is present in stdlib xml module (but I don't know if the behaviour matches).  Only unicode.utf8_iso.* and xml.sax.writer are not present.

Looking at ./satellite_tools/test/testxmlwriter.py, I'm not sure that this file is even testing any code in satellite/spacewalk.  It doesn't import any spacewalk code.  It does write an xml file that may be used by some other tests.  However, I can't find any file that invokes it and in addition, it doesn't appear to be runnable:

python testxmlwriter.py
  File "testxmlwriter.py", line 65
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xa9' in file testxmlwriter.py on line 65, but no encoding declared; see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html for details

./satellite_tools/test/testxmlparser.py also doesn't look like it is testing any sattellite/spacewalk code.  If necessary, it's use of utf8_to_code looks like it may be possible to port to something from http://packages.python.org/kitchen/api-text-converters.html#transformation-to-xml

So.  Are these unittest files being used or can they simply be discarded?  If they are used, can we port them away from PyXML so that we can get rid of that dependency?

.. [1]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Toshio/Remove_PyXML