Re: libxml bundling

At 14:27 08/05/2003, Sascha Schumann wrote:

On Thu, 8 May 2003, Per Lundberg wrote: On Thu, 2003-05-08 at 10:34, Zeev Suraski wrote:

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.

+1 Bandwidth is really cheap these days, as well as hard drives. Who cares about a couple of megs extra? :-)

    It's not all about storage; it is about maintability.
    libxml2 is released so frequently that it makes no sense to
    bundle it.  Furthermore, libxml2 is basically installed on
    every system released in the last 1-2 years which renders the
    bundled lib redundant.

I think there are two separate issues then: 1. Do we want to bundle libxml. My take on this is that yes, we do - we cannot rely on the target platform to contain such an essential component. It's even more important when we see so many different versions - we'll be doing our users quite a service when we put a version that's known work well with the current version of PHP, and demonstrate the same behavior, bugs, etc. 2. Do we want to put libxml into our source tree. My take on this is that no, we don't - we should bundle libxml at the packaging stage. For developers, it would slightly complicate the initial build process (you'd have to fetch the currently-blessed libxml and put it in the right place), but that shouldn't affect our decision. Zeev