| Abstract | libxml2 is the XML C parser and toolkit developed for the Gnome project (but usable outside of the Gnome platform). XML itself is a metalanguage to design markup languages, i.e. text language where semantic and structure are added to the content using extra "markup" information enclosed between angle brackets. HTML is the most well-known markup language. Though the library is written in C a variety of language bindings make it available in other environments. Libxml2 is known to be very portable, the library should build and work without serious troubles on a variety of systems (Linux, Unix, Windows, CygWin, MacOS, MacOS X, RISC Os, OS/2, VMS, QNX, MVS, ...) |
| Version | $Revision: 1.19 $ |
| Generated | $Date: 2005/09/29 10:22:06 $ |
| Phase 1 - Identification | |
|---|---|
| Status | Active |
| Group | XML |
| Number | #006 |
| Assigned 2002-04-09 | |
| Demand | Yes |
| libxml2 has good demand; it is used by various popular open source application e.g. Evolution, Kino, Dia, Gstreamer, Gnumeric, Inkscape, Anjuta, Koffice, etc. Its also a requirement for PHP5 and included in other OS e.g. Solaris and MacOS X. | |
| License | Yes |
| Licenses - MIT License | |
| Bestpractice | Yes |
xml2 is widely used implementation of various existing W3C standards related to markup languages.
Ref. https://mailman.research.att.com/pipermail/graphviz-interest/2004q2/001274.html |
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| Stable | Yes |
| ABI is stable since 2003, recently API addition in 2.6.22. | |
| Depends | Yes |
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| Phase 2 - Investigation | |
| Rationale | |
| Upstream | Yes |
| Upstream location | |
| Distros | Yes |
| There are no known problems between package maintainers and upstream providers. Most distro ship libxml2 as part of OS release, even Solaris and MacOS X includes this library. | |
| Versions | Yes |
Most distros are shipping with 2.6 compatible versions of xml2. Version supported by distributions:
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| Patches | Maybe |
| These are common in any software module. There are no known outstanding vendor patches. | |
| I18n | |
| Resources | Yes |
| LSB Engineers are actively working on including xml2 library into XML module. | |
| Phase 3 - Implementation | |
| Db | |
| Spec | |
| Test | Yes |
| libxml2 has couple of different test suite available. One of them is XML2 regression test suite available at http://www.xmlsoft.com. The other one is the OASIS XML test suite. "As of release 2.4.16, libxml2 passes all 1800+ tests" This appears to now be a W3C test suite, see http://www.w3.org/XML/Test. Investigating whether we can use/wrap this test suite. | |
| Devel | |
| Sample | |
| Appbat | |
| Notes | |