In mid-September, we reported that Nick Wellnhofer, the long-time maintainer of the widely used XML parsing library libxml2, planned to step down from the project. A few days ago, that change became official.
When looking at one of the latest commits in the project’s GitLab repository, you can now see the following notice:
“This project is unmaintained and has known security issues (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/-/issues/346). It is foolish to use this software to process untrusted data.”
Good on Nick. Do what you want buddy, you had a good run. Go have some fun doing what you love.
Now it’s time for a corporate user of libxml2 to donate resources for maintenance and bug fixing or forking it. It doesn’t always have to be on the shoulders of unpaid maintainers.
Considering that
qt6-webenginealso depends upon it, I guess someone will come and pick it up soon, or maybe they will just create an alternative?My guess, it’ll be rewritten in rust.
Well, there’s already
sax,xml-rsandrust-xml.How many more do you want?
Better off giving more attention to those that already exist than making more rewrites.
There’s also xml5ever, for if you hate XML.
Didn’t know about those. Thanks for bringing them to my attention. I wonder how they compare to libxml2.
I don’t know much to compare either, just did a quick search.
I might end up checking some out later when I start doing more stuff with Rust, but nothing for now.