[lxml-dev] tests crash on libxml2 2.6.19 - drop support?

[Stefan Behnel]

Hi all,

when going through my usual little pre-release QA test scripts, I noticed that
the tests on the 1.3 branch currently trigger a reproduceable crash under
libxml2 2.6.19. Don't know about older ones as they don't even compile on my
machine. Sadly, valgrind doesn't tell me enough about where the problems come
from, so it's not a quick thing to fix.

Now, there are two ways to tackle this: work around the problem or drop
support for 2.6.19 and earlier. Given the fact that the release of 2.6.20 just
had its second anniversary (and knowing that libxml2 still had a lot of bugs
fixed since), I do not feel much in favour of the first solution. I would
rather encourage people to upgrade their libs if they want to use lxml 1.3.

This is not a problem for most Linux systems where installing new libs tends
to be trivial (and is often done on a regular basis to fix security holes).
Neither is it a problem for Windows as long as Sidnei keeps providing us with
static builds against recent libs.

But I remember that MacOS X usually ships with pretty old versions, and I
think I recall one of them being 2.6.16 and the other being 2.6.19. So taking
this decision would mean dropping out-of-the-box support for those MacOS
versions. Can anyone please verify that these were the versions in question?
What are the lib versions that current MacOS systems ship with? And which OS
versions would we drop support for if lxml 1.3 stopped running under 2.6.19?

Hoping for some insights,
Stefan