Clark Cooper, maintainer of the Perl XML::Parser module, has announced on SourceForge that he and Pythoneers Fred Drake and Paul Prescod will be taking over maintenance of James Clark's expat parser.

Expat is probably the most successful XML parser to date: the C-based code has been incorporated in products from Mozilla through to language bindings in Perl, Python and PHP.

The expat project will now be hosted on SourceForge, at Clark's suggestion. Cooper writes:

The first goal of the team is to release a new distribution in which expat builds and installs into a shareable library. This release will also merge in the changes that exist in the version of expat that is currently distributed with Perl's XML::Parser module.

This goal should address some of the major concerns, raised by Matt Sergeant in a recent message to XML-DEV, about the lack of a definitive shared library distribution for expat.