I know some folks from China, Russia, and North Korea who would love to become maintainers. No pay needed. I recommend Jia Tan - he has vast experience maintaining opensource software.
For instance, consuming XML and creating it are two very different use cases. Zooming into consuming it, perhaps your input data has more guarantees than libxml2 assumes, such as the nonexistence of meta definition tags.
Basically something behaves like your typical JSON parser and serialiser but for XML.
To my knowledge, this is what TinyXML2 does, and I've used TinyXML2 for this before to great effect.
It's doable, just use the right tools and hacks :)
Processing schema-less or broken schema stuff is always hilarious.
Good times.
Maybe you don't need libxml2 specifically (good luck finding an alternative to parse XML in C and other such languages though), but "I don't like the complex side of XML so let's pretend it doesn't exist" doesn't solve the problem most people pick libxml2 for. It's the de-facto standard because it supports everything you could possibly need.
I feel like it adds more weight to my feeling that we should have a software building code. When you have software that's critical infrastructure, with a nutso security policy like "no embargoes / 0day me bruh", we should have some regulations in place to require the software be maintained properly (that is to say, in a sane manner) or you can't use it commercially or for safety-critical things. Which would inevitably force commercial entities to pay for the maintenance so it could be done right.... which they should be doing already, the same way any company that builds safety-critical infrastructure has to pay to do it right.
If we want society to be safe, we have to make a law that enforces it. That's how that shit works.
(as an aside: holy shit, you're a prolific HN submitter, and all from different sources. where do you get it all?)
This made my brain go "Oh no, not this again. Open source projects don't owe you..." etc etc.
> or you can't use it commercially or for safety-critical things
Oh. Yeah, okay, absolutely! For safety-critical, I would like to think the responsibility already lies with the integrator/seller, but making it explicitly so can't hurt.
The license for libxml2 (like the license for almost any kind of open source software) already states "THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT." I don't see how you can put the responsibility even more on the integrator/seller than that. It literally states the devs don't even guarantee it works correctly.
Expanding that to more fields would be interesting, but difficult and expensive across the board. Particularly any sort of requirements like that generally incur significant regulatory and certification overhead.
However, if it was done similar to PCISS as an industry forum it might work better. Especially if certain fields like anything connecting with the electric grid we're required to use certified software.
It's not the "safety critical" software that needs this fixed, it's all software in general. There's a million software systems that have important privacy sensitive data or safety relevant processes that fly under the "safety critical" radar.
* XSLT is still the only native templating option for HTML pages that runs natively in the browser (but just now you are limited to XSLT v1.0 which as a number of drawbacks and limitations)
* XSLT/XML is still best at text markup. In particular interpolation. There is no simple way to represent marked up text in, say, JSON.
* Content federation (atom, rss) is still very dependent on XML.
Surely somebody somewhere has money to pay for a greybeard to fix XSLT for us? It seems far to fundamental to be left to wither on the vine.
Meanwhile libxml2 is still everywhere. Without someone with real backing, a core piece of infrastructure is about to go unmaintained.
Once again, the open-source funding problem is laid bare: the internet runs on the unpaid evenings of a few people until they burn out (add relevant reference from XKCD, obviously).