Re: [xml] What is the _private field actually for?

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Thu, Sep 28, 2006 at 10:25:44PM +1000, Michael Day wrote:
> Hi Daniel,
> 
> >  Hum, yeah, I don't see how to do this except by adding yet another API
> >with yet another extra data, not nice but I don't see a workaround.
> 
> Alright, I will submit a patch for this later then, as it's not a very 
> big change.

  okay, thanks !

> >  Well getting DTD and entity parsing right is unfortunately horribly 
> >  complex
> >and it took a while to get conformant to the spec. Some of the result is 
> >that some inconsistancies like that sneaked in because the design has been
> >revamped at least 3 time. In a sense XInclude is yet another extra layer in
> >that already complex stack.
> 
> Okay, but then it should be feasible to fix this, right? Is it 

  Hopefully, yes. The core of the problem is to make sure there is no
side effects.

> worthwhile me taking a look at it to see what is going on? I just don't 
> know much about how the SAX2 parser handles entities and when the parser 
> contexts get switched around, but I should be able to trace through it, 
> if you're willing to accept the resulting patches :)

  Sure, it is likely to end up being in or around 
xmlParseExternalEntityPrivate() in parser.c though it already copies
_private if oldctxt is provided. I could chase this, I may be a bit faster
than you, but having other people learn about the code is IMHO a good thing
so if you're not afraid, go for it, definitely !

> >  Considering the amount of resources, and how painful the transition from
> >libxml version 1 has been (I only now managed to get rid of it from Fedora 
> >!)
> >I have no intent for anything like libxml3 in the foreseable future, sorry
> >again !
> 
> That's a pity, but quite understandable; it's shocking how so many 
> different versions of the same libraries need to be installed to make 
> all the apps work. (Prince actually ends up getting linked to libxml2 
> and expat, which is used by Fontconfig, so two XML parsers!)

  Well, I actually changed the Licence to MIT at some point to be compatible
with XFree (at the time), but they went back to expat, I guess some people
complained about the dependancy.

Daniel

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