Re: [xml] XML regression test cases...

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Tue, Oct 18, 2005 at 12:23:01PM -0700, Jain, Nilesh wrote:
> This what worries me most. As mentioned earlier, stability of ABI
> behavior is big concern for LSB, if it changes between minor version,
> then it become very difficult for LSB certification to change. This can
> be a big issues because if LSB based it specification and runtime test
> on 2.6.20 and let us say Suse picks 2.6.21 and Mandirva 2.6.22 in there
> release for LSB certification, then it will fail because ABI behavior is
> not compatible.. I hope I have articulated the problem correctly.
>
> Another aspect I am looking at is the usage of model these ABI.. how
> application uses these ABI.. Does application really care about these
> changes? could you help me understand that, or send me some pointer to
> explore that. 
>
> BTW: If somewhere I talking absurd, please accept my apologies as being
> novice about XML.

  Being novice about XML is fine, as long as you can understand the rules of
the game in that area.
 You seems to be missing somewhat how complex the set of specs related
to XML that libxml2 implements. sometime bugfixes implies changes of behaviour
because the behaviour is wrong accordingly to the associated XML specs,
and not fixing the behaviour to follow the spec would be a totally wrong
approach, because the stability of the underlying specs is way greater
than the one of any software based on libxml2. So fixing behaviour to follow
the specs is the right approach to long-term maintainance, and to preserve
the interoperability.

  In a nutshell
    interoperability at the XML level is more important than interoperability
    between libxml2 releases.

 This doesn't mean that APIs or ABI get broken, actually you can poll all
the linux vendors around and Sun Microsystems if you want, I'm pretty sure
they will tell you that libxml2 is a stable piece of code for them. It grows,
it improves but applications don't break because of it.
 It certainly is the case for Red Hat !

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Desktop team http://redhat.com/
veillard redhat com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
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