Re: [Nautilus-list] Re: libxml Issues

[Ali Abdin <aliabdin aucegypt edu>]

* Darin Adler (darin eazel com) wrote at 14:21 on 03/08/00:
> 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.

Well - I am the one who actually brought up this issue with DV in a private
email. I was in the process of debugging gnome-db2html2, and was mailing him
about the bugs that I found. Most of his responses were 'Known issue. Upgrade
to libxml2' and then I explained to him that I can not.

There will be issues with the 'help' stuff if this is not fixed. For example,
I have the '%' symbol in one of my docs. libxml1 goes crazy on it and spews
out incomprehensible data (and this is rendered to the user).

I believe DV provided very detailed instructions (at xmlsoft.org) on how to
upgrade. This would allow you run both libxml1 and libxml2 applications, but
you will only be able to compile for libxml2. Oh, and libxml2 will probably
not run on a system with only libxml1.

Making libxml2 part of the GNOME 1.4 platform has pros and cons, making it
part of the GNOME 2.0 platform also has pros and cons. I believe the concensus
is to leave it for GNOME 2.0 though.

Regards,
Ali