in versions >= 8.3). The core code is more robust and efficient than what
was there before, and this also reduces risks involved in swapping different
libxml error handler settings.
Before 8.3, there is still some risk of problems if add-on modules such as
Perl invoke libxml without setting their own error handler. Given the lack
of reports I'm not sure there's a risk in practice, so I didn't take the
step of actually duplicating the core code into older contrib/xml2 branches.
Instead I just tweaked the existing code to ensure it didn't leave a dangling
pointer to short-lived memory when throwing an error.
These are unnecessary and probably dangerous. I don't see any immediate
risk situations in the core XML support or contrib/xml2 itself, but there
could be issues with external uses of libxml2, and in any case it's an
accident waiting to happen.
Prior to 8.3, these changes are not critical for compatibility with core
Postgres, since core had no libxml2 calls then. However there is still
a risk if contrib/xml2 is used along with libxml2 functionality in Perl
or other loadable modules. So back-patch to all versions.
Also back-patch addition of regression tests. I'm not sure how many of
the cases are interesting without the interaction with core xml code,
but a silly regression test is still better than none at all.
I have changed the name of the new parse function to xml_valid and fixed
a reference to SortMem which meant that the code as supplied would work
against 7.3 and 7.4 but wouldn't work in CVS.
