Re: remove contrib/xml2

On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 4:18 PM, Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> wrote:
>
> Robert Haas wrote:
>>
>> There has been some more discussion lately of problems caused by
>> contrib/xml2.
>>
>> http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-bugs/2010-01/msg00251.php
>> http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-bugs/2010-01/msg00198.php
>>
>> I think we need to either (1) fix the bugs and update the
>> documentation to remove the statement that this will be removed or (2)
>> actually remove it.  Nobody seems interested in #1, so PFA a patch to
>> do #2.  It also rips out all the libxslt stuff, which seems to exist
>> only for the purpose of supporting contrib/xml2.
>
> The problem is that there are people who use the XSLT and xpath_table stuff
> on text data and so don't run into these bugs.
>
> I agree it's a mess but I don't think just abandoning the functionality is a
> good idea.

I'm one of those people. :)

Expecting to see contrib/xml2 go away at some point, possibly without
replacements for xslt_process and xpath_table, I've been working on
some plpgsql and plperlu work-alikes targeted at TEXT columns, as the
xml2 versions do. I hope these (attached) will be of some help to
others. Note, these are not the exact functions I use, they are
lightly edited to remove the use of wrappers I've created to paper
over the transition from xpath_nodeset() to core XPATH().

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Mike Rylander
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