[clam-devel] Xerces update

[David García Garzón]

On Tuesday 01 June 2010 20:33:19 SAn wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 15:16, David García Garzón
> 
> <david.garcia at barcelonamedia.org> wrote:
> > Just to notice that I ported clam to use Xerces 3 instead 2.8
> 
> Great!
> 
> > If your distro does not have Xerces 3 (like old ubuntu hardy) you can
> > backport xerces 3 (as i did for the testfarm ubuntu client) or use the
> > xmlbackend option to choose libxml++ instead.
> 
> Whats the difference on the backends? Performance, features?

I am not sure of which one is more efficient. Benmarching is wellcome. In the 
case we were having efficiency problems the bottle neck was float number 
parsing not the xml parsing itself.

Regarding API's Xerces is more periphrastic and i like more libxml++ as api. I 
would drop Xerces but, at least, the last time I took a look at it, the error 
reporting in libxml++ was very poor; just dumping the error on stdout disables 
you to bring the error into a dialog, for example. Another reason to keep them 
both is that in some platforms one of them is not as available or is giving 
problems so being able to switch to the other is very convenient.

The other problem of libxml is that it brings a lot of gtk stuff as 
dependency. It looks ironic now that we use Qt for most apps (CLAM used fltk 
on the first place). It would be wise to add a QtXml backend as we are linking 
against it anyway for applications.

David.