Re: libxml2 in gnome 1.4

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Thu, Mar 22, 2001 at 06:26:03PM -0800, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> Apparently this change severely broke many parts of Nautilus,
> including the doc converter and metadata, and lots of other
> code. Arguably the code it broke was making illegal use of XML, but

  gnome-db2html2 was using libxml to parse SGML, I blamed this
since i heard about this, make noise, to no avail. Of course
this broke with a conformant parser. I actually the problem
yesterday and rereleased a working version of gnome-db2html2
using a Docbook SGML parser embedded with it which should
work in a decent way. Please don't object this change with QA
reasons because if your QA consider using an XML parser for 
parsing DocBook SGML okay for a release, then i don't want to hear
about it ...

> this is still major compatibilty breakage. In fact, I don't think it
> is even possible to write code that works with both the old libxml and
> the new one, and worse yet, data formats would be incompatible.

  Yes suddenly the data format becomes well formed XML. It's not
taht it's incompatible, it is that it is legal, period.

> This change is therefore not acceptable for inclusion in GNOME 1.4,

  Maybe

> or in any GNOME 1 platform based release.

  Do you want a nice PR "Gnome decided to not follow standards" on /. ?
You were a firm advocate of dot releases in the past. If you changed
your mind tell it clearly. Programs were abusing some weakness of
libxml1, this need to be fixed. The fact that libxml1 was able to
parse non well formed XML was never part of the API or the conditions
of use of this library.
  
> Worse yet, people are
> considering making changes to apps that depend on the new libxml1,
> which would make them incompatible with the older libxml1. This would
> be a huge disaster for platform compatibility.

  They are fixing bugs.

> So I ask you to revert this change unless you can address the compat
> issues.

  Reverting changes, no way. We may not ship head now but people
must fix their bugs. One of the 2 key points I said I would support
when running for the Board elections were conformance to standard
and improve I18N handling. This change is a huge improvement in both
directions, I won't step back without getting the feeling that a
majority of people want to step back.

> At some point we will have to solve all our problems with localized
> text (probably by switching everything to UTF-8), but we always
> expected that to be for GNOME 2.0.
> 
> If you'd like more specific examples of what is breaking I can get
> people to provide them.

  I got some and fixed some of the Nautilus crap already.

> I am sorry to have to say this, but compatibility is essential and we
> can't allow a compat-breaking change like this to go into the release.

  Maybe not in 1.4, but I will definitely argue to try to get it
in 1.4.1.

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Network http://redhat.com/products/network/
veillard redhat com  | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/

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