Finally finished the libxml2-2.6.0 release from hell at 3am yesterday. To give an idea the ChangeLog since 2.5.10 are 1132 lines long. you can check the xmlsoft.org news to get an shorter version of what got in. Lot of new cleaner parsing API, SAX2, proper error handling, xmlWriter and Walker APIs, lots of bug fixes. The resulting code is cleaner, more modular, smaller and faster even with the new stuff, and it should still be API and ABI compatible (I'm typing this on my Red Hat 9 desktop with libxml2-2.6.0 replacing 2.5.x default, no trouble). There is a 2_5_X branch in CVS but it really should not be needed.

Now I need to 1/ close the related bugs 2/ make some new docs 3/ do the maintainance work that such huge change will obviously generate 4/ look at some changes done at the spec level like XML-1.1 and the 3rd edition of XML-1.0 . But I feel far more comfortable with the current framework than with the 2.5.x one.

William Brack have been helping me tremendously with libxml2/libxslt maintainance and improvement, I need to thank him, and maybe point out that he's probably the most senior hacker on the GNOME project. He operates from Hong-Kong, where he is semi-retired, and if I undertsand correctly he was already programming in the 60's, that didn't stop him learning Python in the last month to refactor the code generating the XML Unicode codepoint checks in libxml2, or gdb'ing and fixing parts of libxslt that I find myself scary to debug, Kudos to Bill !