[gdal-dev] Note on Xerces

[Nicklas Larsson]

Hi,


I just want to give a heads up on discussions related to Xerces, which
in the future might affect (the availability) the GDAL drivers
depending on named library.

The maintainer of Xerces noted in November last year:

  "I'd strongly advise pulling or at least deprecating (don't know the
  official process) all the Macports relying on Xerces, they're all at
  risk using this code or Xalan. I am the last maintainer left, I don't
  support the Mac for my own software anymore, and once I'm fully off
  Xerces in a few years, I seriously doubt it has a future unless
  somethiing changes." [1]

Indeed, unless something happens regarding future maintenance of
Xerces, the following drivers might be in the risk zone:

- "INTERLIS 1" and "INTERLIS 2" drivers
- GMLAS - Geography Markup Language (GML) driven by application schemas
- NAS - ALKIS

Maybe expat or libxml2 can be used as replacement?

Best regards,
Nicklas



[1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/XERCESC-2257?focusedCommentId=17898273&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels%3Acomment-tabpanel#comment-17898273