[Glade-devel] Why libxml2 and not GMarkupParser?

[olexiy irtech cn ua (Olexiy Avramchenko)]

Tim Müller wrote:

> Hi list,
>
> Just out of curiosity: why does libglade2 depend on libxml2?
>
> I admit I am somewhat ignorant about the internals of libglade2, but at first 
> glance I could not find anything that could not also be done with 
> GMarkupParser, which is part of GLib. Or am I missing something here?
>
> Admittedly GMarkupParser is not quite as refined as libxml2 - especially in 
> the error handling -, but then: if the .glade file is faulty, you're in 
> trouble anyway. The .glade XML files don't seem to use things like namespaces 
> or non-standard entities either, so GMarkupParser should be able to handle 
> them just fine, at least as far as I can see.
>
> libxml2 is 924 kB of size on my system. I think getting rid of this particular 
> dependency would be quite nice. Of course it doesn't make much difference for 
> full-fledged GNOME apps, but for Gtk+-only applications it seems a worthwhile 
> optimisation, and might make libglade more attractive for applications that 
> are designed to run also in memory-restricted environments (e.g. embedded 
> systems etc.).  Getting rid of libxml2 should decrease application start-up 
> time as well (although I am not sure how relevant this is on modern desktop 
> systems).
>
> Any thoughts on this?
As for size issues: I'm afraid that Glib's markup stuff doesn't handle 
compressed xml files,
like libxml2 does. For example: I have ~600KB xml for my current 
project, gzipped it's about ~36KB.

    Olexiy