On Tue, Apr 05, 2005 at 09:10:06AM -0400, seth vidal wrote:
[...]
yum-2.3.2-1
- Mon Apr 04 2005 Jeremy Katz katzj@redhat.com - 2.3.2-1
- update to 2.3.2, now requires python-elementtree for xml parsing
Why yet another XML library ? What is so special about that library and yum ?
We've moved to elementTree for parsing the xml metadata from libxml2.
The tests we've done have shown a 2-3x speed improvement with a lighter memory footprint.
Is that worth adding yet another XML Parser package to the distribution used by a single tool ? Is there a compatibility layer to still use libxml2 ? If I remember correctly, the performance problem wasn't libxml2 itself but the specific usage within yum, i.e. collecting the data, libxml2 by itself is parsing the megabyte sized file in less than a tenth of a second. I'm surprized the solution ends up going to use a python specific library instead of trying to find why the interface between libxml2 and yum generated that problem. I don't remember you saying you would switch library as a result.
Daniel