Avoid use of MSXML

• Key: LOGCXX-35
• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Resolution: Fixed
• Priority: Minor
• Assignee: Andreas Fester
• Reporter: Curt Arnold
• Component/s: Configurator
• Affects Version/s: 0.9.7

Description

Currently log4cxx uses libxml2 or MSXML to parse XML configuration files. MSXML has pretty significant potential side-effect, it requires initializing and shutting down COM and uses Microsoft language extensions. There is no significant benefit to using MSXML. The configuration files do not require anything beyond the most rudimentary XML support (no schema, DOM, etc), so Expat would be sufficient. Xerces-C would be overkill but would keep things in the Apache family and avoid introducing additional license issues.

Comments

[Curt Arnold]

APR contains an XML parser abstraction in apr-util that may be convenient. log4j 1.3 has a upward compatible replacement of the DOMConfigurator called JoranConfigurator and it may be best just to drop the existing DOMConfigurator and port the JoranConfigurator.

[Curt Arnold]

Assigning to Andreas to clean up the configurations scripts to eliminate detection of libxml2, setting LOG4CXX_HAS_XML, etc.

apr_xml provides a partial DOM-like API with comments, processing instructions, etc discarded) . Did not see specification of character encoding used in API, assumed UTF-8 but will need to confirm.