Re: libxml bundling

On Thursday, May 8, 2003, at 04:34 AM, Zeev Suraski wrote:

At 01:17 07/05/2003, Edin Kadribasic wrote:

Sterling, You have just added 3.5 MB of source into the PHP code tree despite your assurances that libxml was only "slightly" bigger than expat which takes up "only" 432 KB. This is IMHO completely unnecessary as libxml comes preinstalled as a shared library on most modern Unix systems and because it adds bloat to PHP distribution.

Our target audience is not just modern Unix systems. And with all due respect to modern Unix systems, the versioning hell they're going to is pretty similar to the way Windows looked like circa 1992, which means that if we're relying on existing libraries, we're begging for trouble. I see the seconding and thirding and fourthing of this message, but I still fail to understand why people consider the nuance of increasing the package size, something that's completely insignificant for almost all of our users, as a too high a price for keeping PHP on top of the recent technologies. Good XML handling is as basic as good forms handling in this day and age.

I agree with Zeev on this. While bundling lack aesthetic appeal (to me), I think it is the only way to address possibly rapidly changing libxml changes, as well as providing support for systems which do not have libxml installed already. George