In mid-September, we reported that Nick Wellnhofer, the long-time maintainer of the widely used XML parsing library libxml2, planned to step down from the project. A few days ago, that change became official.
When looking at one of the latest commits in the project’s GitLab repository, you can now see the following notice:
“This project is unmaintained and has known security issues (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/-/issues/346). It is foolish to use this software to process untrusted data.”
Good on Nick. Do what you want buddy, you had a good run. Go have some fun doing what you love.
Now it’s time for a corporate user of libxml2 to donate resources for maintenance and bug fixing or forking it. It doesn’t always have to be on the shoulders of unpaid maintainers.
Considering that
qt6-webenginealso depends upon it, I guess someone will come and pick it up soon, or maybe they will just create an alternative?My guess, it’ll be rewritten in rust.
Well, there’s already
sax,xml-rsandrust-xml.
How many more do you want?Better off giving more attention to those that already exist than making more rewrites.
Didn’t know about those. Thanks for bringing them to my attention. I wonder how they compare to libxml2.
I don’t know much to compare either, just did a quick search.
I might end up checking some out later when I start doing more stuff with Rust, but nothing for now.
Never bothered to check how many packages depend on libxml2. It’s 418 packages that directly depends on it.
I hope this is a nail in the coffin for xml. It’s just so unpleasant to work with, even through great libraries.
Wishful thinking. XML is going to be around for a very long time.
two have expressed interest in taking over: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/-/commit/9c80a89af2fdf4f853892f84e46580f4902658ba#note_2626536
Yes, things will be so much better when we eventually replicate all of XML’s functionality in JSON.
It’s great for non-HTML markup, like https://hyperview.org/.
A lot of the hate is undeserved. It has had awful paradigms built around it (like SOAP), but that doesn’t make XML inherently bad by any means.
Out of curiosity, why do you consider XML unpleasant to work with?
Not the one you asked, but I don’t like XML compared to alternatives like JSON.
The main problem with XML is that it’s an unnecessarily complicated standard. There are often multiple ways to represent the same thing, each with their own gotchas and drawbacks.
JSON on the other hand has a much simpler standard. The entire JSON standard fits easily in one page. It’s also closer to how data is actually represented in memory. There’s often one ideal way to represent whatever you have in memory to a JSON file, and the reverse is also true.
Despite it’s simplicity, JSON covers most cases XML would cover. Often in a more elegant way.
If you like pain, then XML is the right choice for you.
Sure it is, but I don’t see a good enough replacement.
Although I have only used XML a couple of times, which were in other people’s projects, and considering their low complexity, they might as well have used JSON, XML does have a space where JSON is not good enough.
