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?
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.
There’s also xml5ever, for if you hate XML.