Re: [xml] does libxml never touch _private field of struct?

[Luca Padovani <lpadovan cs unibo it>]

Hi,

On Thu, 2003-04-17 at 06:50, Kang Jeong-Hee wrote:
[...]
> you mean all those _private field of structs are unused by libxml?

this was the subject of a very recent thread (did you check the m.l.
archives?)

The answer is: libxml2 does _not_ use that field itself, but several bindings
on top of libxml2 do (gdome2 in particular). Under some circumstances, libxslt
uses that field to store information about keys. Think _private is also
used for schema validation, but not sure about this.

Some related "facts": _private won't be removed from libxml2 in the near future,
nor it seems there are easy way to ensure libxslt doesn't touch it. The current
situation is thus potentially dangerous for all the software that uses it, and
the solution is to do hashing (external to libxml2) of libxml2 nodes.
Depending on the application this may be acceptable or not. Alternatively,
you may use it and accept the risk (in fact we've been using gdome2 + libxslt
for years without ever noticing the problem).

-- luca