1Extracted from the documentation:
2   http://xmlsoft.org/FAQ.html#Compilatio
3
4See also the generic INSTALL file for configure options
5
6Compilation
7
8   1.What is the process to compile libxml ? 
9
10     As most UNIX libraries libxml follows the "standard":
11
12     gunzip -c xxx.tar.gz | tar xvf -
13
14     cd libxml-xxxx
15
16     ./configure --help
17
18     to see the options, then the compilation/installation proper
19
20     ./configure [possible options]
21
22     make
23
24     make install
25
26     At that point you may have to rerun ldconfig or similar utility to
27     update your list of installed shared libs.
28
29     At this point you can check that the library is properly functionning
30     by running
31
32     make tests
33
34   2.What other libraries are needed to compile/install libxml ? 
35
36     Libxml does not requires any other library, the normal C ANSI API
37     should be sufficient (please report any violation to this rule you
38     may find).
39
40     However if found at configuration time libxml will detect and use
41     the following libs:
42
43         libz: a highly portable and available widely compression library 
44             http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/zlib/
45         iconv: a powerful character encoding conversion library. It's
46	     included by default on recent glibc libraries, so it doesn't
47	     need to be installed specifically on linux. It seems it's
48	     now part of the official UNIX specification. Here is one
49	     implementation of the library which source can be found here.
50             http://clisp.cons.org/~haible/packages-libiconv.html
51             ftp://ftp.ilog.fr/pub/Users/haible/gnu/
52
53   3.make tests may fail on some platforms 
54
55     Sometime the regression tests results don't completely match the
56     value produced by the parser, and the makefile uses diff to print
57     the delta. On some platforms the diff return breaks the compilation
58     process, if the diff is small this is probably not a serious problem
59
60Daniel
61veillard@redhat.com
62