[Dev] Linux package distribution status

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 08:10 PM 1/26/2006 -0500, Mike Taylor wrote:
>I've opened a bug to research if it's possible to replace libxml2 with pyxml
>
>https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5073
>
>On Jan 26, 2006, at 7:29 PM, Grant Baillie wrote:
>
>>On Jan 26, 2006, at 15:28, Heikki Toivonen wrote:
>>
>>>>libxml2         yes
>>>
>>>Andi pointed out that we might be able to replace this with something
>>>else (possibly smaller even), which could also get rid of the patch
>>>requirement.
>>>
>>>I know zanshin uses libxml2 currently. Anything else?
>>>
>>>I know we need an XML lib that understands XML namespaces. Are any other
>>>features required, like XPath? What would be good replacement libraries?
>>
>>If you're doing namespace-aware callback-based XML parsing, then python's 
>>own expat module will do the trick.
>>
>>If you're turning XML into a full DOM tree (or vice versa), then I think 
>>you need some other library. Besides libxml2, there's also pyxml 
>><http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyxml/>. (I don't know if this is either 
>>smaller or better than libxml2).

There seems to be a strong meme out there that ElementTree is both faster 
and easier to use than any other XML API for Python, and due to popular 
acclaim it has been approved for inclusion in Python 2.5.  I have not had 
occasion to try it myself, however.  Anyway, if it meets the requirements 
then we'll get it "for free" when Python 2.5 comes around, allowing us to 
then drop the separate dependency.