On 1/17/2026 5:13 AM, Jonathan Wakely via Gcc 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.
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.
I'd land here as well given what I know. It doesn't seem materially
different than other build reqs like the libraries you mentioned.
jeff
