Re: libxml2 in gnome 1.4

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com> writes:

> 
>   Done, I tested commited the parser upgrade. It is in the 
> gnome-xml LIB_XML_1_BRANCH head.
> 
>   This version of the XML parser will accept UTF8 and ISO-Latin-1
> documents only, it will generate only UTF8 output.
> 
>   I have put tar and RPMs for people to test the binary compatibility
> and that it doesn't break things at:
>     ftp://xmlsoft.org/test/
> 
>   I was able to relaunch my desktop after the upgrade, galeon included,
> so I'm awaiting reports (please include at least stack traces and if this
> looks hard, grab me on #gnome IRC). If by Friday I don't get a showstopper
> I will release 1.8.12 officially.
> 

Daniel,

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
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.

This change is therefore not acceptable for inclusion in GNOME 1.4, or
in any GNOME 1 platform based release. 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.

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

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 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.

Regards,

Maciej