Re: [xml] Adding a build/configure *option* to use ICU converters

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Thu, Sep 27, 2007 at 05:48:00PM +1000, Mark Rowe wrote:
> On 26/09/2007, at 18:33, Daniel Veillard wrote:
>
> > I don't see why your patch shouldn't be applied and yes adding the  
> > option
> > on configure would be sensible (as long as it's off by default).  
> > Also I would
> > really prefer if Unixes didn't switched it on when distributed as  
> > part of
> > the OS to maintain a predictable behaviour on all similar platforms.
>
> I'm not sure I understand this argument.  Other than the character  
> sets supported by the library, there should be zero difference between  
> functionality when using ICU or iconv.  The character sets available  
> to iconv appears to be very platform-dependent as well.  A comparison  
> of two Debian machines I have at hand shows that one has over 1150  
> encoding aliases available to iconv, while the other only has 950.  On  
> two Macs that I have in front of me running different versions of Mac  
> OS X, one has 460 and the other 400.
>
> Could you clarify what you mean by this?  I'm not advocating that ICU  
> be the default, I'm just curious why you feel vendors should not use  
> it if it is present.

  Very simple, I don't want to be perceived as depending on ICU. I don't
want all apps depending on libxml2 to depend (indirectly) on ICU. 
I also know that iconv memory footprint at runtime is near neglectible,
when I looked at ICU (a long time ago admitedly) it really wasn't looking
that way. I don't want a simple xmllint of a file using latin character to
drag megabytes of memory just because you though it was a good idea to
link to ICU 'because it is available'. The end result will be 'libxml2
is a memory hog' and people will just don't look at why this happened
just on a given platform.
  If there is any risk of this, I prefer to not put any patch in the 
source.

Daniel

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