[ruby-core:32057] Re: merging nokogiri to ext/

Hi,
On 2 September 2010 11:34, Ryan Davis <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Then can we please unbundle rexml?

I agree we should unbundle rexml (unless it suddenly becomes quite active),
 and I think we should even do it if Nokogiri is not merged to ext/.

The reasons were mentioned by others.
It is some kind of a "black hole" in the stdlib, which newcomers
easily fall into because there are no guards.
 (I myself was one of those and tried to make my own parser)

If it is unbundle, they will at least have to search for a decent one,
and probably will find something better.
Letting it there is giving some advice like "use this, it must be
good, it's stdlib".
If Nokogiri was not merged, then the least would be to put a note
about HTML/XML parsing libraries.

It would of course be even easier if Nokogiri was made the default.

I agree with Medium Ruby-ism (but maybe let stdlib in peace for the moment).
Probably the best for now is to just automatically install Nokogiri as gem.
That way it can keep update and newcomers have a good HTML/XML parsing library.

Regards,
B.D.

P.S.: I am not very aware of the details, but AFAIK linking Nokogiri
with a old buggy version of libxml2 is rather bad, and it could then
build a Ruby with a buggy library, which only solution would to
install newer libxml2 and reinstall Ruby.
The gem would be a better solution for this reason.