[xslt] scope of variables

[Frank Steinberg <steinberg ibr cs tu-bs de>]

Hi,

I'm using libxml2/libxslt for a couple of years. When I recently moved  
some XSLT code from an old machine running libxslt 1.1.12 to a newer  
machine that is running 1.1.24, I found a problem with the scope of  
global variables. I could reduce the case to the following very short  
(meaningless) snippet:

$ cat test.xsl
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform 
">
  <xsl:variable name="x">x</xsl:variable>
  <xsl:template match="x[ name = $x]"/>
</xsl:stylesheet>

$ xsltproc test.xsl test.xsl
XPath error : Undefined variable
compilation error: file test.xsl line 4 element template
Failed to compile predicate

1.1.12 does not lead to this error. From reading the specs I cannot  
see why the global variable $x is not defined within the Xpath  
expression of a template's "match" attribute.

Does anybody have an explanation for this changed bahavior? Am I doing  
something wrong?

Thanks,

 -frank