Related to an issue from a previous post, Greg Beaver has posted a solution to his Relax NG schema problem in PHP.
Shortly after my last blog post, I got a very helpful email from Rob Richards, who offered to help me with my trials and tribulations. He took a quick look at the schema for package.xml, and a sample package.xml and was able to find two small tweaks to make parsing actually work (gasp). This changes everything. I am abandoning the creation of a relax NG schema in favor of the battle-tested xsd. The error messages for xsd validation are far clearer than the rng ones.
The code included shows how much simpler the error messages are with the XSD validation option versus the RNG ones.