[Pkg-isocodes-devel] Switch for data to JSON

[Dr. Tobias Quathamer]

Dear fellow maintainers,

I'd like to suggest that we switch the iso-codes data files from XML to
JSON. The big advantage for this is in my opinion that it will be
tremendously easier to write programs which access the data directly.

XML is rather hard to parse and has quite an overhead. JSON, on the
other hand, has gained much popularity with the rising of web
applications. The result is that almost every programming language
supports reading JSON files.

I have committed the JSON files to git, in the new directory "data".
There are two files for each ISO standard, one containing the data, the
other containing a JSON schema, which allows one to check the integrity
of the JSON data file. It's very similar to the doctype definition in
the XML files.

Please take a look, I'd be glad to hear any comments.

If we go forward with this, I would deprecate the XML files but keep
them in sync with JSON for the next stable release of Debian.
Afterwards, we could drop the XML files entirely.

Regards,
Tobias

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