ANNOUNCE: The GNOME XML toolkit 2.6.0

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

Application
===========

The GNOME XML toolkit 2.6.0

Description
===========

Libxml2 is the XML C parser and toolkit developed for the Gnome project
(but usable outside of the Gnome platform).
It also provides the xmllint XML/HTML processing tool.
The libxml2-2.6.0 release is a major revision release it should remain
API
and ABI compatible but got a lot of change.
   Web site at: http://xmlsoft.org/

Enhancements
============

- Increased the library modularity, far more options can be stripped out, a
--with-minimum configuration will weight around 160KBytes
- Use per parser and per document dictionnary, allocate names and small
text nodes from the dictionnary
- Switch to a SAX2 like parser rewrote most of the XML parser core,
provides namespace resolution and defaulted attributes, minimize memory
allocations and copies, namespace checking and specific error handling,
immutable buffers, make predefined entities static structures, etc...
- Rewrote all the error handling in the library, all errors can be
intercepted at a structured level, with precise information available.
- New simpler and more generic XML and HTML parser APIs, allowing to
easilly modify the parsing options and reuse parser context for multiple
consecutive documents.
- Similar new APIs for the xmlReader, for options and reuse, provided new
functions to access content as const strings, use them for Python
bindings
- a lot of other smaller API improvements: xmlStrPrintf (Aleksey Sanin),
Walker i.e. reader on a document tree based on Alfred Mickautsch code, make
room in nodes for line numbers, reference counting and future PSVI
extensions, generation of character ranges to be checked with faster
algorithm (William), xmlParserMaxDepth (Crutcher Dunnavant), buffer
access
- New xmlWriter API provided by Alfred Mickautsch
- Schemas: base64 support by Anthony Carrico
- Documentation fixes and README (William Brack), search fix (William),
tutorial updates (John Fleck), namespace docs (Stefan Kost)
- xmllint options: --dtdvalidfpi for Tobias Reif, --sax1 for compat
testing, --nodict for building without tree dictionnary, --nocdata to
replace CDATA by text, --nsclean to remove surperfluous namespace
declarations
- Added xml2-config --libtool-libs option from Kevin P. Fleming
- A lot of profiling and tuning of the code, speedup patch for
xmlSearchNs() by Luca Padovani. The xmlReader should do far less allocation
and it speed should get closer to SAX. Chris Anderson worked on speeding
and cleaning up repetitive checking code.
- libxml-2.0-uninstalled.pc from Malcolm Tredinnick
- deactivated the broken docBook SGML parser code and plugged the XML
parser instead.

Fixes
=====

- Parser<->HTTP integration fix, proper processing of the Mime-Type and
charset informations if available.
- Relax-NG: bug fixes including the one reported by Martijn Faassen and
zeroOrMore, better error reporting.
- Python bindings (Stéphane Bidoul), never use stdout for errors output
- Portability: all the headers have macros for export and calling
convention definitions (Igor Zlatkovic), VMS update (Craig A. Berry),
Windows: threads (Jesse Pelton), Borland compiler (Eric Zurcher, Igor),
Mingw (Igor), typos (Mark Vakoc), beta version (Stephane Bidoul), warning
cleanups on AIX and MIPS compilers (William Brack), BeOS (Marcin 'Shard'
Konicki)
- Bug fixes: xmlCleanupParser (Dave Beckett), threading uninitialized
mutexes, HTML doctype lowercase, SAX/IO (William), compression detection
and restore (William), attribute declaration in DTDs (William), namespace
on attribute in HTML output (William), input filename (Rob Richards),
namespace DTD validation, xmlReplaceNode (Chris Ryland), I/O callbacks
(Markus Keim), CDATA serialization (Shaun McCance), xmlReader (Peter Derr),
high codepoint charref like &#x10FFFF;, buffer access in push mode (Justin
Fletcher), TLS threads on Windows (Jesse Pelton), XPath bug (William),
xmlCleanupParser (Marc Liyanage), CDATA output (William), HTTP error
handling.
- cleanup of "make tests"

Download
========

ftp://xmlsoft.org/

GNOME Software Map entry
========================

http://www.gnome.org/softwaremap/projects/libxml