This package can be configured to use either or both of the libxml and
expat libraries for parsing XML documents.  libxml is used for the
tree-based (DOM) parsing and the event-driven (SAX) parsing.  Expat is
used only for the event-driven parsing and is not necessary if
one wishes to use libxml.

Note that the descriptions here are for Unix systems. 

One should use libxml, version 1.8.9. This is available from

  ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/sources/libxml/

and the home page for the library is 
  http://xmlsoft.org/

Many Linux installations provide a version of libxml (typically with
the header files in /usr/include/gnome-xml or
/usr/local/include/gnome-xml.) This is a slightly earlier version of
libxml and we recommend using libxml-1.8.9. However, the configuration
script will usually adapt the compilation to use these if a more
recent library is not specified.

 If you have root privileges, you might consider installing
libxml-1.8.9 and then proceed with the default installation.
  R INSTALL --clean XML

If there is no version of libxml installed on your system, or you want to use a 
different version than is already installed, you have to tell the configure
script where to find this library. You can do this by setting the environment
variables 
    LIBXML_INCDIR  and LIBXML_LIBDIR
to point to the directories containing the header files and the shared
library libxml.so, respectively.

The following steps will usually give the desired results:
Install the libxml in some directory, say /tmp/libxml-1.8.9

   cd /tmp
   tar zxvf libxml-1.8.9.tar.gz
   cd libxml-1.8.9
   ./configure
   make

Now, tell the configuration for the XML package where to find the
libxml distribution. 

  setenv LIBXML_INCDIR /tmp/libxml-1.8.9         #  LIBXML_INCDIR=/tmp/libxml-1.8.9; export LIBXML_INCDIR
  setenv LIBXML_LIBDIR /tmp/libxml-1.8.9/.libs

  R INSTALL --clean XML_0.3-1.tar.gz

That should be sufficient.


Far more information about the XML package and installing it and these
other libraries is available from 

     http://www.omegahat.org/RSXML


We would appreciate hearing about any bugs, comments, suggestions, etc.
and they can be submitted the Omegahat bug tracking system via the
form at
  http://www.omegahat.org/bugs
or by sending mail to 
   omega-bugs@www.omegahat.org