On April 3, 2004 12:05 pm, Andi Gutmans wrote: > We'd need to have someone who'll maintain this by probably having a stable > libXML2 tarball someplace in our CVS, and then change makedist to create > the two packages (one with and one without libXML2). This should make > everyone happy as long as it's properly maintained.
While I am not entirely opposed to the idea of bundling libxml2 if XML extensions that are dependant on it are enabled by default there is 1 problem with this approach. Given our history with bundled libraries (gd, expat, sqlite, etc...) we always tend to lag (often quite a bit) behind the official stable release even if we do sync the libraries relatively frequently the release cycle of the libraries themselves is usually much more frequent then that of PHP. Libxml2 in particular seems to have an extremely active release cycle. Another problem is that bundling of a library prevents an easy upgrade of said library by simply recompiling it, instead entire PHP must be rebuilt.
Many users (including me) don't always want to use the latest and greatest but want to use something which they know is stable. They'd probably be happy to upgrade PHP and libXML2 in one stable step. Personally I think that as long as the lag isn't too big it's fine and often has its advantages. One of the biggest is that ISPs usually won't turn off default options so they'd automatically have GD, SQlite and XML which is pretty useful.
In any case, this is why we would have two tarballs. One for users who want to get the whole bundle and don't want to have to mess with installing the correct version of libXML2, and one package for users like you who prefer being able to upgrade libXML2 without touching PHP.
Andi
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