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Re: RFC: New required package: libblkid1



Theodore Ts'o wrote:

> The original code which was contributed to me by Andreas Dilger.  It
> uses a hand-coded XML parser which is quite small (2.7k of text in a
> shared library).  In contrast, libxml2.so is 610k text, 43k data, and
> 3.5k BSS, which just boggles the mind.

There is probably a lot of stuff in XML that Andreas' code doesn't
support. I also have written my own subset-of-XML parser for a specific
application, and it also is quite small. If all you want to do is handle
simple, self-contained documents that consist of tags with attributes
and PCDATA, for example:

   <tag1 att1='foo' att2='bar'>
      <tag2 att3='baz'/>
      <tag3 att4='quux'>pcdata</tag3>
   </tag1>

then it's not much work at all to tokenize that and generate either
SAX-style callback events for each element, or a DOM-like tree of
element objects. It's when you get into all the other things that XML
defines, like a wide variety of character codings, external entities,
DTD parsing and validation, etc., etc., etc. that your code base starts
getting pretty big.

I admit, though, 610k of text still seems pretty huge.

Craig

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