Re: gnome-games 2.17.2

[Callum McKenzie <callum spooky-possum org>]

On Sun, 2006-11-12 at 17:23 +0100, Tomasz Kłoczko wrote:
> On Sat, 11 Nov 2006, Callum McKenzie wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, 2006-11-10 at 16:51 +0100, Tomasz Kłoczko wrote:
> >> On Mon, 6 Nov 2006, Jason D. Clinton wrote:
> >>
> >>> gnome-games-2.17.2
> >>> ==================
> >>>
> >>> Where to get it
> >>> ---------------
> >>>
> >>> http://download.gnome.org/sources/gnome-games/2.17/
> >>
> >> Why new gnome-games uses expat ?
> >> After last changes gnome-games uses more than two XML parser libraries
> >> (libxml2 and expat).
> >>
> > All GNOME programs suffer from this problem. Most of the libraries use
> > libxml since that is the officially endorsed parser. Unfortunately, one
> > of the low-level libraries (fontconfig? I can't remember) uses expat as
> > its XML parser. So it gets included too.
> 
> In this case it is completly not true.
> Fotconfig can be configured to use libxml (use --enable-libxml2 in 
> configure parametres). The same situaction is in case for example dbis 
> (but not in case dbus-glib .. Q: why ?)
I have no idea about why others have made their decisions, or for that
matter why distributions like Ubuntu don't compile fontconfig with
libxml. A bit of a look at the code tells me why gnome-games now
requires expat now: the ggz libraries.

Unfortunately we (the free-software community that is) are cursed with
two good XML implementations. The expat API suits some people more than
the libxml API and vice versa. So neither is dominant. It is all very
well for GNOME to stipulate libxml as the preferred library, but when
external libraries have made the other choice we're a bit stuck.

In any case it doesn't really matter. The real killer for GNOME apps and
libraries is all the cruft that libgnomeui drags in (this is being
worked on, see Project Ridley or LibgnomeMustDie on live.gnome.org).
Further, I believe that neither XML library has a big overhead of
unshared data. In other words you won't win until *all* apps on your
system use only one of either expat or libxml.

Yes, you are paying a price for developer convenience, but fixing it
doesn't start with gnome-games.

> [..]
> > BTW glib provides its own xml-lite parser. So there are three...
> 
> This is next known stupididy.
> Most of the packages uses standalone XML parsers. I don't know even one 
> package which uses this parser.
> XML parser is neccessary for many non glib/gtk+/gnome packages, so
> embedding this in glib only enlarges current libraries enthropy.
At the very least Mahjongg uses the glib "xml" parser. The glib parser
is there for a very specific kind of problem: those cases where you
don't want a full XML parser, but you want something light and easy to
use that parses some tagged text. If I recall correctly, I did seriously
consider using libxml when I wrote the Mahjongg code, but it just wasn't
worth the effort.

 - Callum