1  Extracted from the documentation:
 2     http://xmlsoft.org/FAQ.html#Compilatio
 3  
 4  See also the generic INSTALL file for configure options
 5  
 6  Compilation
 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  
60  Daniel
61  veillard@redhat.com