Re: Heads up on Pango HEAD

[Keith Packard <keithp keithp com>]

Around 12 o'clock on Jun 5, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> I vote against these patches, they are dumb. You don't want to be able
> to build a library with two different ABIs depending on configure-time
> arguments. 

For regular Linux distributions, I think this argument is a good one -- 
avoiding gratuituous incompatibility should reduce bug reports.

But, for embedded and other small devices, having many libraries which 
perform the same task is wasteful, both in memory and (often more 
importantly) in persistant storage space.

Probably the right thing to do is make an option to use libxml2, but 
require that it be explicitly requested in the configure command.

Note that my plan for using libxml2 was to use the SAX interfaces, which 
are pretty close to expat making the amount of code that is different 
relatively small.

Keith Packard        XFree86 Core Team        HP Cambridge Research Lab