[Nautilus-list] Re: libxml Issues

[Darin Adler <darin eazel com>]

on 8/2/00 11:30 AM, Daniel Veillard at Daniel Veillard w3 org wrote:

> Well that encompasses a bit more than even gnome-hackers :-)
> For example I don't think Red Hat will ship libxml2 in their
> next version. Except Mandrake I don't know of any distribution
> shipping libxml2 now.

If Nautilus 1.0 is changed to require libxml2, a necessary result of that
would be that we'd make libxml2 part of the GNOME 1.4 release. So whether
it's already part of a particular distribution is beside the point, I think.

>> I recall that when libxml2 first came out, we couldn't switch because it was
>> a case of switching all modules to use libxml2. But Daniel claims that this
> 
> The problem was that the changes needed to the code were unclean.
> It is now possible with recent releases of libxml2/libxml to compile
> exactly similar code with both.

I know that the changes were "unclean" and I remember dealing with this. I
also noted your release note that says you can compile similar code with
both. But I am a bit confused by your use of tags in cvs. We develop using
the LIB_XML_1_X tag in cvs. Perhaps we should have moved to another branch,
because it seems that this branch does not include the changes in recent
releases that allow source code compatibility with libxml2. For some reason
LIB_XML_1_X is not tracking your changes to libxml.

> It is possible to have libxml/libxml2 installed together. But only
> one of the devel packages can be installed at a time. One also cannot
> link simultaneously to libxml and libxml2. But both shared libs can
> be present and in use in the system.

This creates a real problem for us. We need to be able to compile many
different modules in the same prefix. So unless there is an irresistible
reason not to, this problem would be enough reason for us to switch to
libxml2 as part of our GNOME 2.0 changes rather than doing it before then.

    -- Darin