Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 177282
xmlNode member 'line' is 16-bit integer, many XML files are longer than 65535 lines
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:07:22 EST
The 'line' member of 'xmlNode' is 16-bits long and useless for generating error message for large XML files. The author of 'libxml2' has been unhelpful, so I wrote a short ABI safe patch that resolves the problem. I'm posting this report to save others aggravation. See the GNOME bug report for discussion and details. Notes: RH libxml2-2.6.16-6 GNOME libxml2-2.6.22 'libxml2' compiled with the patch will work for both applications compiled and linked against the regular 'libxml2.so' and programs compiled and linked with the patched 'libxml2'. However patch-version applications will see garbage line numbers if run against the standard 'libxml2'. This can be prevented with a minor-version 'soname' tweak and/or library version dependency (I'm fuzzy on the details of the latter, never having done it myself), but I've got no time to fiddle with this.
Created attachment 122932 [details] BI safe change 'line' member of 'xmlNode' from 16-bit to 32-bit integer
As already posted on the GNOME bugzilla, those kind of changes are a trade-off. The RHEL version won't diverge from upsteam, this should be discussed there. Large instance are streamed anyway, not processed with a DOM, this patch just makes the DOM based processing harder by inflating the in-memory size, while for streaming processing getting the line number should be doable without breaking inflating the size of DOM trees. Daniel