[gdal-dev] Note on Xerces

[Even Rouault]

Hi Nicklas,

Thanks for the head up. yes I'm aware that almost nobody maintains 
Xerces-C anymore.  Regarding the Interlis & NAS drivers, they could 
certainly be moved to using expat instead (with some effort...). The 
GMLAS driver cannot however. It strongly relies on unique capabilities 
of Xerces-C related to exposing the content of XML schemas which are 
essential to the GMLAS driver, and I'm not aware of any open source 
replacement for that. The driver is now used by recent QGIS versions too 
for complex feature support for WFS. If Xerces-C was going to be 
removed, I guess we'd have to vendor it within the GDAL source tree

Even

Le 20/06/2025 à 09:56, Nicklas Larsson via gdal-dev a écrit :
> 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
>
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