On 21 Mar 2011, at 01:13, William A. Rowe Jr. wrote: > I wish we had a better understanding of where expat is headed, or if it > is truly abandoned. It seems strange to rely on an orphaned dependency.
I think we can be relaxed about it. We're one of many users, and our usage is hardly pushing the boundary. On the other hand, the reason we're not pushing the boundary is that to do so would be to re-invent the wheel. That is to say, applications interested in markup are introducing other libraries with more capabilities. Expat has proved too limiting. That raises the question: is there mileage in dropping expat and substituting libxml2? For our core usage, it's pretty-much a drop-in replacement, and it's the basis for a whole bunch of hitherto-separate applications like mod_proxy_html, mod_transform, mod_xml2 or mod_security. If I were to substitute libxml2 and demonstrate an expat-free version of APR and HTTPD, would there be support for that? I'm thinking the choice of native XML parser could become a compile-time or even a run-time choice. I'd expect a quick&dirty prototype demo to be just a couple of hours work. -- Nick Kew Available for work, contract or permanent http://www.webthing.com/~nick/cv.html
