Re: [xml] libxml questions

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Tue, Sep 20, 2005 at 10:41:51AM -0700, Jain, Nilesh wrote:
> Hello All,

  Hi,

> Let me give brief introduction to the list... I am an active contributor
> to LSB.. and currently working on LSB Desktop module and planning to
> include libxml2 into it.

  libxml2 is at the OS level, not at the Desktop level. It is included
in Solaris and in MacOS X, and used for non desktop purposes too. It is
a requirement for PHP5, used by the desktop deployments too (though
for KDE it is limited to the documentation I think), but it is a base
OS library.

> I have few starter questions... 
>
> 1.  I saw recently group has released 2.6.22, to me which has minor
> number change. so I am just wondering is there a guidelines which can
> educate me how the released numbers are changed.

  2 is ABI stability level libxml2.so.2
  6 is main level of changes in the core parser, doesn't change much
 22 incremented by default.

See http://xmlsoft.org/news.html for an history of the releases.

I have no plan for libxml2.so.3 or libxml3 at this stage

> 2.  I have gone through the release notes and seems to me library has
> stable ABIs but just wanted to make sure that, when did library had an
> ABI change?

  API addition. I had to release 2.6.22 because there was a problem
with 2.6.21 API, this is one of the few times this happenned.

> Which version is best candidate for making base for
> standardization..

  the latest and not 2.6.21.

> any plans to change ABI in near future?

  no

> 3.  Does library has test suites developed for testing.. can someone
> point me which is recommended one..

  It's included in the tarball for one part, there is an extra one
bigger using W3C (NIST/Sun/MS) tests for schemas. It can be run by
make tests or launching special test binaries.
  Read the README.tests in the distribution, it's best explained there.

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Desktop team http://redhat.com/
veillard redhat com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/