On Sat, 17 Jan 2026 at 12:22, Iain Sandoe <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Hi Folks, > > > On 17 Jan 2026, at 12:13, Jonathan Wakely via Gcc <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > 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. > > this approach ^ … > > >> 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. > > … combined with this ^ > > would cover most bases, I’d think (efficiency if the platform has the lib > and resilience if not).
Efficiency and security, assuming the platform will keep its copy updated with CVE fixes more rapidly than we'll update things in a bundled copy of the code. > > > 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. > > agreed > Iain >
