Re: Native XML

From: Mike Fowler <mike(at)mlfowler(dot)com>
To: "David E(dot) Wheeler" <david(at)kineticode(dot)com>
Cc: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>, Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net>, Anton <antonin(dot)houska(at)gmail(dot)com>, pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: Native XML
Date: 2011-02-27 19:45:37
Message-ID: 4D6AA9E1.6040907@mlfowler.com
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On 27/02/11 19:37, David E. Wheeler wrote:
> On Feb 27, 2011, at 11:23 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
>
>> Well, that's why I asked --- if it's going to be a huge chunk of code,
>> then I agree this is the wrong path to pursue. However, I do feel that
>> libxml pretty well sucks, so if we could replace it with a relatively
>> small amount of code, that might be the right thing to do.
> I think that XML parsers must be hard to get really right, because of all those I've used in Perl, XML::LibXML is far and away the best. Its docs suck, but it does the work really well.
>> No, because the xpath stuff is fundamentally broken, and nobody seems to
>> know how to make libxslt do what we actually need. See the open bugs
>> on the TODO list.
> XPath is broken? I use it heavily in the Perl module Test::XPath and now, in PostgreSQL, with my explanation extension.
>
> http://github.com/theory/explanation/
>
> Is this something I need to worry about
I don't believe that XPath is "fundamentally broken", but I think Tom
may have meant xslt. When reviewing a recent patch to xml2/xslt I found
a few bugs in the way were using libxslt, as well as a bug in the
library itself (see
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2011-02/msg01878.php)

However if Tom does mean that xpath is the culprit, it may be with the
way the libxml2 library works. It's a very messy singleton. If I'm
wrong, I'm sure I'll be corrected!

Regards,
--
Mike Fowler
Registered Linux user: 379787

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