[xml] XPath crashes with 2.6.27 - any workaround?

[Stefan Behnel <stefan_ml behnel de>]

Hi,

we keep getting bug reports from lxml users about XPath crashes with libxml2
2.6.27 when errors occur (such as an unknown function). This has been fixed in
2.6.28, however, 2.6.27 happens to be pretty frequently installed on Linux
systems, so people keep using it and then complain when it crashes.

Is there anything we could try to work around this problem? I would at least
like to detect it when errors occur *before* libxml2 crashes.

(ok, we could generally emit a warning when running XPath evaluations with
that version, but a lot of code works nicely, it's just that it crashes on
errors...)

Stefan