libxml2-2.14.0 (wait for upstream fix)

[Bruce Dubbs]

New minor version.

I'm not sure what is going on with upstream. This is the third release this year. I'll note that the version history shows no updates between 2004 and 2022.

v2.14.0: Mar 27 2025

### Major changes

The HTML tokenizer now conforms fully to HTML5. Several non-standard syntax warnings were removed. Note that HTML5 tree construction isn't implemented yet.

Binary compatibility is restricted to versions 2.14 or newer. On ELF systems, the soname was bumped from libxml2.so.2 to libxml2.so.16.

The serialization API will now take user-provided or default encodings into account when serializing attribute values, matching the serialization of text and avoiding unnecessary escaping.

The XML parser won't try to merge consecutive CDATA sections as before to align with web standards. Each CDATA section will create exactly one node or SAX callback.

Support for RELAX NG can now be disabled with a new configuration option independently of XML Schemas support. It is still enabled by default.

The "legacy" configuration option won't enable support for HTTP and LZMA anymore. These features will be removed in the next release.

Parts of the xmllint executable were refactored, allowing the combination of more options. OOM errors should be reported reliably now.

Several improvements were made to the build systems. Meson is fully supported now.

Parts of the buffering code were reworked and simplified.

Overflow checks before reallocations were hardenend.

Some unprefixed symbols were renamed to avoid namespace pollution.

### New features

Input callbacks can now be set on a parser context and an improved API to create parser input is available. The following new functions, taking a parser input object, were added:

• xmlCtxtParseDocument
• xmlCtxtParseContent as replacement for xmlParseBalancedChunkMemory and xmlParseInNodeContext
• xmlCtxtParseDtd

The xmlSave API now has additional options to replace global settings.

Parser options XML_PARSE_UNZIP, XML_PARSE_NO_SYS_CATALOG and XML_PARSE_CATALOG_PI were added.

An API function to install a custom character encoding converter is now available. This makes it possible to use ICU for encoding conversion even if libxml2 was compiled without ICU support, see example/icu.c.

### Deprecations

Access to many public struct members is now deprecated. Several accessor functions were added to use instead.

More internal functions were deprecated.

### Removals

Metadata about the HTML4 content model was removed from the htmlElemDesc struct and related functions were deprecated.

The FTP module and related functions were removed.

Support for the range and point extensions of the xpointer() scheme was removed. The rest of the XPointer implementation isn't affected. The xpointer() scheme now behaves like the xpath1() scheme.

Several legacy symbols and the functions in xmlunicode.h were removed.

ELF version information was removed.

The shell was moved from libxml2 to xmllint. Several related functions are no longer available.

The libxml.m4 file containing autoconf macros was removed.

The --with-tree configuration option was removed.

The hack to detect single-threaded programs under glibc was removed.

### Planned removals

Support for HTTP and LZMA compression is planned to be removed in the 2.15 release.

The following features are considered for removal:

• Modules API (xmlmodule.h)
• Schematron support
• Support for zlib compressed file I/O
• Legacy Windows build system in win32

RELAX NG support is still in a bad state and a long-term removal candidate.

[Xi Ruoyao]

Please postpone this, when I test gettext with system libxml2 some tests fail and the gettext developer found a libxml2 bug from those failures. The bug looks severe enough to me:

• ​https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?66960
• ​https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/-/issues/884

[Douglas R. Reno]

This update will probably cause a lot of breakage again as well based on the removals and the fact that binaries compiled with it are incompatible with systems with versions < 2.14

[Xi Ruoyao]

Another issue triaged from libxkbcommon test failure: ​https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/-/issues/886

[Xi Ruoyao]

Another issue: ​https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/localsearch/-/issues/391.

[Bruce Dubbs]

So it looks like upstream won't fix issue 391. From your ticket it is unclear what package(s) is/are failing and what type of fix is needed.

[Douglas R. Reno]

Issue 391 is just for localsearch