Re: libxml2 in gnome 1.4

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Fri, Mar 16, 2001 at 02:57:30PM -0500, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
>    I know it is too late for including libxml2 in gnome 1.4, but maybe
> the distributors could fix this problem.

  Hum, as much as i'm happy at the idea of people transitionning because
1.x branch is really sick in a number of ways, as much I am concerned
by suggesting this at the very last moment. Especially if different
distributions start shipping different versions while we are trying
to make a great deal of efforts to define a unified programming platform
encompassing distributors and operating systems.

>    The reason we can not jump to xml2 is because it would break
> applications that were developed against GNOME 1.2 (that is the first
> time libraries were shipped with a dependency on libxml1) and are
> being shipped binary-only.
> 
>    The only library that used libxml1 in GNOME 1.2 was libglade
> (gnome-print did, but it was not part of the stable platform, and it
> is binary incompatible with 1.2 anyways). 
> 
>    A possible fix for this problem is to ship those libraries in
> gnome-1.2 that required libxml1 with their old package names (this
> means, we ship gnome-xml, libglade and we also ship a libxml2 package
> and a libglade2 package, the later linked/compiled against libxml2).

  I don't know the context well enough to know if this would work,
I'm sure if libxml2 had been planned to be released withing 1.4 this
would have simplified some of the work on Nautilus, It is unclear
how fast the overall framework can be switched without ending up
with a disaster :-\
  I already had to fight today because people from the PLD distribution
decided to start shipping libxml2 as a libxml package. If there is a
decision made to integrate libxml2 I would prefer this to be planified,
so that we don't end up with lots of problem and incompatibilities between
distributions (and I won't get burried under tons of bug reports either).

   Basically I'm concerned that making that switch now sounds like
a recipe for a disaster, for exemple I never got a successulf report
of someone managing to completely and successfully rebuild Gnome with
libxml2 ... I would far prefer a graceful transition, and see more
testing, though I'm confident in the solidity of libxml2 now, there
have been enough changes that it may not just be a recompile (see 
the set of instructions [1] ).

Daniel

[1] http://xmlsoft.org/upgrade.html

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