ElementTree vs. lxml (python XML libraries)

John (J5) Palmieri johnp at redhat.com
Thu May 12 16:34:44 UTC 2005


This is just an exploratory e-mail as I don't know all the issues
involved and don't want to get into a flamewar if someone has strong
opinions on either side.  

I have been looking at what library to use for parsing the XML content
in the dbus python bindings.  Suggestions were to use lxml
(http://codespeak.net/lxml/) however we don't currently ship it.  Yum
currently uses ElementTree for its parsing.  lxml aims to be compatible
with the ElementTree API with a few exceptions.  On top of that it uses
libxml2 as its base library and extends the ElementTree API with things
like XPath, Relax NG, XSLT and c14n.  While the dbus bindings don't need
these features some of the other stuff I want to work on may.  

Is it a possibility to port yum to lxml? Are we married to ElementTree?
Would having both libraries in the distribution be objectionable? Does
anyone else have a deeper knowledge of either or both libraries that can
shed more light on the issue.

-- 
John (J5) Palmieri
Associate Software Engineer
Desktop Group
Red Hat, Inc.
Blog: http://martianrock.com




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