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Re: switching to libxml2



Scavenging the mail folder uncovered Peter Teichman's letter:
> On 23 Apr 2001 20:58:57 +0200, Federico Di Gregorio wrote:

> libxml1 is not deprecated. It is the xml library used by the GNOME 1.x
> platform. Until GNOME 2 is released, libxml1 will be in active use.
> There are significant source-level differences between applications that
> use the two, so a porting effort would be a large amount of work.

you are (almost) right but lets see the libxml2 documentation:
 
  Warning: unless you are forced to because your application links with a
  Gnome library requiring it, Do Not Use libxml1, use libxml2
  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^

and then

  Let me put some emphasis on the fact that there is far more changes from
  libxml 1.x to 2.x than the ones you may have to patch for. The overall code
  has been considerably improved and the conformance to the XML specification
  has been drastically improve. Don't take those changes as an excuse to not
  upgrade, it may cost a lot on the long term

but the only problematic gnome library, afaik, is libglade and i just
recompiled it against libxml2 without changes. the fact that gnome 1.x
still uses libxml1 does not make it any good if the author writes as
i cited above. so, if is possible, lets switch and switch fast to
a better xml library, i.e. libxml2.

if you know of libraries that can't be trivially ported to libxml2, please
name so that we can investigate and, if necessary and possible, send some
patches upstream.

> That said, recent versions of the two xml libraries are made to coexist.
> There shouldn't be any files in common between the two. Any conflict
> between libxml1-dev and libxml2-dev is an artificial one.

this is a very good short term solution. if is not possible to have 
anything work with libxml2 someone should nmu the two -dev packages.
the author is much more rigid than me on the badness of libxml1 :)

ciao,
federico

-- 
Federico Di Gregorio
MIXAD LIVE Chief of Research & Technology              fog@mixadlive.com
Debian GNU/Linux Developer & Italian Press Contact        fog@debian.org
                      The number of the beast: vi vi vi. -- Delexa Jones



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