[Python-Dev] Python XML Validator

[Mike Meyer]

On Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:55:04 +0100 Stefan Behnel <stefan_ml at behnel.de> wrote:
> (weird places these threads come up at, but now that it's here...)
> Mike Meyer wrote:
> > On Tue, 04 Mar 2008 15:44:32 -0800 Ned Deily <nad at acm.org> wrote:
> >> In article <20080302230708.260fa4a9 at bhuda.mired.org>,
> >>  Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> wrote:
> >>> On Thu, 28 Feb 2008 23:42:49 +0000 (UTC) Medhat Gayed 
> >>> <medhat.gayed at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>> lxml is good but not written in python and difficult to install and didn't 
> >>>> work on MacOS X.

Please note that this original complaint is *not* mine. However...

> Due to a design problem in MacOS-X, not a problem in lxml.

I didn't find it noticeably harder to install lxml on MacOS-X than
most other systems.

> But it's not that hard to install either, as previous posts presented.

Depends on how you define "hard". If I have to create a custom
environment with updated version of system libraries just to use lxml,
I'd call that "hard". That was pretty much the only route available
the first time I wanted lxml on OS-X. And ubuntu. And RHEL.

The second time for OS-X, I used an older version of lxml (1.3.6), and
just did "setup.py install". Worked like a charm. That's not hard.

The only system that installing a modern version of lxml on was easy
was FreeBSD, probably because libxml2 and libxslt aren't part of the
system software.

> > However, the authors tend to require recent
> > versions of libxml2 and libxslt, which means recent versions of lxml
> > won't build and/or work with the libraries bundled with many Unix and
> > Unix-like systems
> I wouldn't consider a dependency on an almost three year old library version
> "recent", libxml2 2.6.20 was released in July 2005.

Well, if you're on a development box that you update regularly, you're
right: three years old is pretty old. If you're talking about a
production box that you don't touch unless you absolutely have to,
you're wrong: three years old is still pretty recent. For example, the
most recent release of RHEL is 4.6, which ships with libxml2 2.6.16.

> > Which means you wind up having to
> > build those yourself if you want a recent version of lxml, even if
> > you're using a system that includes lxml in it's package system.
> If you want a clean system, e.g. for production use, buildout has proven to be
> a good idea. And we also provide pretty good instructions on our web page on
> how to install lxml on MacOS-X and what to take care of.

Yes, but the proposal was to include it in the Python standard
library. Software that doesn't work on popular target platforms
without updating a standard system library isn't really suitable for
that.

	 <mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>		http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.