Re: Lenny users: attn about Gnome/libxml2 breakage

[Chris Burkhardt <chris@mretc.net>]

Christian Jaeger wrote:
> (a) consider accessing library-internal types directly by using a
> header file of a library a bug if the library and the library consumer
> are to be packaged separately; since the way of packaging couldn't be
> safely foreseen by an application developper, this means, using such
> types from header files would *always* be a bad thing, and hence, a
> library exposing such information in it's public header files should
> be treated buggy itself.

Does Debian have any existing policy covering this?

I'm not familiar with the libxml2 API, but a quick perusal of the docs
leads me to believe that the correct way to get a pointer to an
xmlEntity struct is through the 'xmlSAX2GetEntity' function. But at the
same time I don't see in the docs anywhere that it is to be considered a
private structure.

Even if the docs are ambiguous, if it is meant to be private, then it
should be enforced as such in the code (like you said, the library
shouldn't expose it in its public header files). Unfortunately, some
languages *cough*c*cough* make encapsulation more difficult than others.

My question in this particular case is, should bug reports be opened
against librsvg, strigi, and the others requesting that they not
directly allocate memory for the xmlEntity structure? I can take the
time to do it, if it should be done.

- Chris Burkhardt