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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] bundling libxml2
From: elfyn@cygwin.com (Elfyn McBratney)

On Fri, 27 Jun 2003, Sterling Hughes wrote:

> Hi,
>
> So I figure I'll restart this discussion.  There are a couple of reasons
> I want to bundle libxml2:
>
> 1) XML support is crucial.  You may not like XML, but its the standard
> for data exchange these days, and is incredibly important when
> interoperating with external services.  A PHP installation should simply
> not exist without XML support, if it does, then imho we've done
> something wrong.  Applications that are distributed need to rely on
> certain features in PHP, XML is one such feature.  I think this much has
> already been agreed upon.
>
> 2) Libxml2 may be installed everywhere, but the version we rely upon
> isn't available everywhere.  As witnessed by a message to the list by
> michael, and a problem that someone else had over IRC.  Its fine to
> allow people to use external versions of libxml2, however, we need a
> recent version to operate.  For example, schema support is pretty
> essential, as its becoming the new DTD format for XML (and is required
> for proper SOAP support).
>
> Its further helpful that users can rely on a certain implementation of
> libxml2 distributed with a certain version of PHP.
>
> Anyhow, I thought I'd again bring this up before the beta.  What do
> people think?

IMO, bundling libxml2 is a win for PHP. The only bad thing I can see is
that it add's an extra ~1MG to the distribution. If the user wants to disable
it, they'd just pass `--disable-xml' to configure, right?

Elfyn
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