This was only used by Chromium/WebKit to detect whether xmlParseContent
really succeeded. It's a horrible, overcomplicated hack.
See 8c5848bd and #767.
The latest spec for what it essentially an XPath extension seems to be
this working draft from 2002:
https://www.w3.org/TR/xptr-xpointer/
The xpointer() scheme is listed as "being reviewed" in the XPointer
registry since at least 2006. libxml2 seems to be the only modern
software that tries to implement this spec, but the code has many bugs
and quality issues.
If you configure --with-legacy, old symbols are retained for ABI
compatibility.
Before, we often used unbuffered input via the lzma or gzip handlers,
more or less inadvertently.
Change the default file handlers from buffered (stdc FILE) to unbuffered
(POSIX fds).
The long-term plan is to remove the built-in HTTP client. There are
still a few downstream projects that use libxml2's client for other
purposes. These users should get deprecation warnings now.
This is a slight break of the API, but users really shouldn't modify the
global error struct. The goal is to make xmlLastError use static buffers
for its strings eventually. This should warn people if they're abusing
the struct.
Note that setting global options has no effect anyway when using any of
the modern parser API functions which take an option argument like
xmlReadMemory or when using xmlCtxtUseOptions.
Global options only have an effect when using old API functions
xmlParse* or xmlSAXParse* or when using an xmlParserCtxt without calling
xmlCtxtUseOptions.
Unfortunately, many downstream projects still modify global parser
options often without realizing that it has no effect. If necessary,
switch to the modern API. Then you can safely remove all code that
changes global options.
Here's a list of deprecated functions and global variables together with
the corresponding parser options.
- xmlSubstituteEntitiesDefault, xmlSubstituteEntitiesDefaultValue
Parser option XML_PARSE_NOENT
- xmlKeepBlanksDefault, xmlKeepBlanksDefaultValue
Inverse of parser option XML_PARSE_NOBLANKS
- xmlPedanticParserDefault, xmlPedanticParserDefaultValue
Parser option XML_PARSE_PEDANTIC
- xmlLineNumbersDefault, xmlLineNumbersDefaultValue
Always enabled by new API
- xmlDoValidityCheckingDefaultValue
Parser option XML_PARSE_DTDVALID
- xmlGetWarningsDefaultValue
Inverse of parser option XML_PARSE_NOWARNING
- xmlLoadExtDtdDefaultValue
Parser options XML_PARSE_DTDLOAD and XML_PARSE_DTDATTR
As per https://peps.python.org/pep-0394/, the python binary can be one
of the following options:
- Python 2
- Python 3
- Not exist
All of the scripts in libxml2 use 'python', which may not exist.
As Python 2 reached EOL on the 1st January 2020, it's safe to move the
scripts to use python3 explicitly.
Add a new configuration flag that controls whether the outdated support
for XPointer locations (ranges and points) is enabled.
--with-xptr-locs # Autotools
LIBXML2_WITH_XPTR_LOCS # CMake
The latest spec for what it essentially an XPath extension seems to be
this working draft from 2002:
https://www.w3.org/TR/xptr-xpointer/
The xpointer() scheme is listed as "being reviewed" in the XPointer
registry since at least 2006. libxml2 seems to be the only modern
software that tries to implement this spec, but the code has many bugs
and quality issues.
The flag defaults to "off" and support for this extensions has to be
requested explicitly. The relevant API functions are deprecated.
These functions shouldn't be part of the public API. Most init
functions are only thread-safe when called from xmlInitParser. Global
variables should only be cleaned up by calling xmlCleanupParser.
This code has been broken and deprecated since version 2.6.0, released
in 2003. Because of a bug in commit 961b535c, DOCBparser.c was never
compiled since 2012. I couldn't find a Debian package using any of its
symbols, so it seems safe to remove this module.
These functions are only needed internally for validation.
xmlGetRefs is inherently unsafe because the ref table isn't updated
if attributes are removed (unlike the ids table).
None of the Ubuntu 20.04 packages depending on libxml2 use any of these
functions (except xmlFreeRefTable in libxslt), so it seems perfectly
safe to deprecate them.
Remove xmlIsRef and xmlRemoveRef from the Python bindings.
