Dear Bioconductor package developers,

The XML package on CRAN has been compiling with an increasing number of
deprecation warnings. Most of these are solvable, so the package is not
going away and will keep working. Unfortunately, the following
functions depend on undocumented interfaces that libxml2 maintainers no
longer wish to support:

parseDTD
dtdElement
dtdElementValidEntry
dtdEntity
dtdIsAttribute
dtdValidElement
xmlContainsElement
xmlContainsEntity

They comprise the "DTD introspection" API. (Not the DTD validation
interface: that's still supported.)

The DTD object also used to be returned in the second element of the
list (named $dtd) by functions xmlTreeParse(getDTD=TRUE),
xmlInternalTreeParse(getDTD=TRUE), xmlNativeTreeParse(getDTD=TRUE),
htmlTreeParse(getDTD=TRUE), htmlParse(getDTD=TRUE). I won't change the
shape of the overall return value (since most users rely on what's
returned with getDTD=TRUE argument by default), but the dtd element is
going to become an empty list.

Chances are that no current CRAN or Bioconductor uses these interfaces.
(I ran checks including all direct reverse dependencies. Flaky Internet
resources aside, there were no changes to worse.) Since the compilation
warnings really need to be solved very soon (any other CRAN package
with this many problems would be archived by now), these functions will
most likely be disabled in the next version of XML. They'll still
exist, but they won't return anything useful. If you really need them
to work, please let me know and we'll try to come up with a different
solution.

-- 
Best regards,
Ivan

_______________________________________________
[email protected] mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/bioc-devel

Reply via email to