Re: [RFC] switching over to libxml2

[Cyrille Chepelov <chepelov calixo net>]

I've polished a bit my libxml2 tree, and here's what I'm up to:
        
     * the fine people who brought libxml1 and libxml2 really want libxml1
to die (actually, to have died many ages ago). libxml1 has the interesting
feature (in the context of dia) of generating incorrect files as soon as you
use anything beyond strict US-ASCII. 

     * My libxml2 tree works very well, as long as you don't attempt to use
bonobo or gnome-print stuff. My personal view on this is that the former is
broken by design, the second can be left for the better days when
gnome-print actually gets maintained. If either of these libraries are
linked in, we *must* use libxml1 (which is broken).

     * since a few versions, libxml1 includes the parser from libxml2, which
limits somewhat the brokenness. At least, in the direction disk->memory, we
can have something workable.

     * I've developed a work-around which would allow to generate
theoretically non-broken files, even using libxml1. This has just one
restriction: it will not work if the local encoding is UTF-8 (which is still
extremely rare, AFAIK). 
                I think this should go in ASAP, so that we at least stop generating files 
which break the XML standard. 

     * We need to go to libxml2, or at least the 2-in-1 hack to do significant progress
in the I18N department.

     * We need to go to GTK2/GNOME2 to do another chunk of significant
progress in the I18N department (both are somewhat orthogonal. Somewhat in
that GNOME2 libs will require libxml2 anyway).

     * GTK2/GNOME2 is not ready for prime time yet; it's not even packaged
for my platform. I won't touch any 2.0 stuff until I get packages that a
casual user (on the other terminal :-) ) can use without getting a segfault a
hour. Notable restriction, on Windows, the GTK2.0 (or approaching) version
is the version to use.


 +------------------+
 |What shall we do ?|
 +------------------+ 
    * for now ? 
    * once 0.89 is out ?
    * after ?


 *** I've put a diff of my XML1.5/2 tree relative to the CVS head in 
http://traminer.dyndns.org/~cyrille/dia, it's still not exactly
ready to be applied, but I'm eager to hear comments on it. 

        -- Cyrille

-- 
Grumpf.