On Fri, 16 Jan 2026 at 20:34, Jakub Jelinek via Gcc <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Fri, Jan 16, 2026 at 03:00:40PM -0500, James K. Lowden wrote: > > Issues: > > > > 1. Bring libxml2 into the GCC repository, or not > > 2. Link to libxml2 dynamically, or not > > 3. Quality/stability of libxml2 > > 4. Maintenance burden in-tree versus build complexity ex-tree > > 5. As of now libxml2 has no maintainer > > > > Thesis: Best is to build libxml2 out of tree and not install it, linking > > libxml2.a into libgcobol. > > Note, while zlib is included in gcc tree, we have --with-system-zlib > option that users can use to use the system libz instead of the included > one. > And in tree vs. out of tree aren't the only options, there is also > the possibility to make it optionally in tree (like e.g. libisl is). > Users can download it (e.g. download_prerequisities does) and unpack > and then it is built in tree, or they don't and then it use system libisl > if it can find it (there are options to point it at a particular library and > its headers), or it is not found and not included.
Yes, I was going to suggest the download_prerequisites approach too. Even if it's a hard requirement to have libxml2 (i.e. the Cobol front-end can't just be non-conforming and missing some features without it), that's analagous to libgmp, libmpfr, and libmpc which are hard requirements but we still don't keep a copy of the code in the tree.
