[Glade-devel] Why libxml2 and not GMarkupParser?

[Olexiy Avramchenko]

Tim Müller wrote:

>Hi list,
>
>Just out of curiosity: why does libglade2 depend on libxml2?
>
>I admit I am somewhat ignorant about the internals of libglade2, but at first 
>glance I could not find anything that could not also be done with 
>GMarkupParser, which is part of GLib. Or am I missing something here?
>
>Admittedly GMarkupParser is not quite as refined as libxml2 - especially in 
>the error handling -, but then: if the .glade file is faulty, you're in 
>trouble anyway. The .glade XML files don't seem to use things like namespaces 
>or non-standard entities either, so GMarkupParser should be able to handle 
>them just fine, at least as far as I can see.
>
>libxml2 is 924 kB of size on my system. I think getting rid of this particular 
>dependency would be quite nice. Of course it doesn't make much difference for 
>full-fledged GNOME apps, but for Gtk+-only applications it seems a worthwhile 
>optimisation, and might make libglade more attractive for applications that 
>are designed to run also in memory-restricted environments (e.g. embedded 
>systems etc.).  Getting rid of libxml2 should decrease application start-up 
>time as well (although I am not sure how relevant this is on modern desktop 
>systems).
>
>Any thoughts on this?
>
As for size issues: I'm afraid that Glib's markup stuff doesn't handle 
compressed xml files,
like libxml2 does. For example: I have ~600KB xml for my current 
project, gzipped it's about ~36KB.

    Olexiy