On Mon, 2017-02-13 at 08:35 -0800, Luke Perkins wrote: > Stefen, > > I submitted a patch request to the APR README regarding the TARBALL vs. SVN > versions of the source file a couple of weeks ago. I have not heard back from > the APR committers regarding the information I needed to successfully build > APR from SVN trunk. The patch request had to do with specifying libxml2/expat > to successfully build APR from the SVN trunk. This extra step is not required > in the APR TARBALL release.
Sorry about that. I guess noone had a round tuit. Always worth a followup if it's important. > Can someone explain the differences between expat and libxml2? I built my > version of APR using libxml2 (2.9.4). Should I have used expat? Is there an > advantage of one over the other. APR's needs are simple, and either will do the job. Originally it used expat: you had no choice. The difference is that libxml2 is much bigger, and does a lot more. It is required for many applications, such as running HTTPD with a module such as mod_proxy_html or mod_transform (for XSLT). In such cases, it makes sense to build APR with libxml2, because otherwise you'll need to load both XML parsers at once! That's why we added the libxml2 option. If your apps don't require libxml2, it probably makes no difference. It won't affect performance one way or the other, unless perhaps in extreme embedded situations where every byte counts! As for expat upgrade, ideally it would make more sense to unbundle it from future tarballs. But that's another argument. -- Nick Kew
