bundling libxml2

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.

I'm against bundling it, there's absolutely no reason to.

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).

We can require certain version in configure.

--Jani

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).

If you need a recent version, why not just require it as part of
the configure tests as usual?

--
Anil Madhavapeddy http://anil.recoil.org
University of Cambridge http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk

From: Sterling Hughes

Hi,

So I figure I'll restart this discussion. There are a couple of reasons
I want to bundle libxml2:
....

From yesterday's thread on this, I thought the plan was to bundle for the
initital beta and see how it goes. Has that plan been scrapped?

Rob

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

I definitely think we should give it a try! +1 for bundling.

Andi

At 12:25 PM 27/6/2003 -0400, 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?

-Sterling

--
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from
bad judgement.
- Fred Brooks

On 27 Jun 2003 12:25:39 -0400
Sterling Hughes sterling@bumblebury.com 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?

I am +1 on bundling libxml2.

I think Sterling is right - PHP should have a decent XML support "by
default". XML is truly used a lot around the web development today, and
I think PHP needs a better competitiveness to other languages, XML-wise.

--
Maxim Maletsky
maxim@php.net

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.

If libxml2 is required , then require it. The 1-3 % of Unix users
that don't have it installed should be able to install libxml2
themselves.. It is easy. The windows users rarely compile PHP
themselves, so they won't notice anyway.

What's more is that the libxml2 as an external package is usually built
with both iconv and zlib support. Is iconv and zlib going to be
bundled too?

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).

You're on a grey area when you try to mix the same dynamic/static libraries
of differnt versions within one executable. ext/yaz (yaz) is going to suffer
from it sooner or later. In fact any library using libxml2 may be suffering
from it.

How about libxslt which is uses libxml2 too. libxslt may be linked
with the dynamic one, but during run time it is actually using the
bundled libxml2 from PHP ! Bottomline is that it becomes difficult which
one is using which one. And difficult to debut too.

Shared libs are wonderful but there is not the error message:
"symbol multiple defined". I bet in the future (if not already) there
are other "sub" libraries using very useful lib libxml2.

If there are -well-defined- rules for this, I'd like to know, so that
I can deal with it..

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?

-Sterling

--
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from
bad judgement.
- Fred Brooks

--

--
Adam Dickmeiss mailto:adam@indexdata.dk http://www.indexdata.dk
Index Data T: +45 33410100 Mob.: 212 212 66