Richard Heck wrote: > No, I just meant that we would have to include it in our sources, since > we cannot rely upon libxml to be available on actual machines that are > running non-Linux OSs. It's available for that OS, yes, but it's not > actually going to be installed. Unlike on Linux, where it either is > installed or else we can rely upon package managers to handle the > dependency.
With the same reasoning you could conclude that we need to ship Qt within the sources. If there is a bug at the right place in Qt, you can get all sorts of problems including severe data loss as well. But, we don't include Qt, since experience tells that such bugs do not happen in the versions included in linux distros. I don't see any problem in relying upon libxml2 as an external dependency. I have made very good experiences with it, and it is widely used. For windows, it would just be included in the requirements bundle, and for linux and OS X it is safe to rely on the systemn versions. I agree that including it in the sources is not an option because of the size. I don't know about the C++ bindings, if these are not as reliable as libxml2 it might be worth it to write some simple ones and include them in the LyX source code. Georg
