Saxon XSLT 3

[Christian Lohmaier]

Hi Michael,

On Mon, Jul 7, 2025 at 2:38 PM Michael Warner
<michael.warner.ut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> [libxslt stuck with XSLT1]
>
> I’m curious if you have ever considered using Saxon instead of LibXSLT and upgrading the filters to make use of the newer language features. I searched the mailing list archives and haven’t found any discussion of this.

There used to be saxon in LibreOffice but it was removed in 2012 with
bfc71eb03e2bc6f26d53f70b32f9a8937086808b and  related commits

And one of the main reasons IIRC was to remove runtime java dependency.

So you'll should find some discussion around that timeframe in the list-archives

> Compatibility would have to be maintained during development. My suggested course of action would be something like:
> 1. Add SaxonC-HE as a dependency

correct me if I'm wrong, but that also is still java based, right?
If so that'd be a problem for e.g. macOS appstore where we cannot use java.

> […]
>  It wouldn’t be a trivial task, of course. It would take me a long time, but I’m willing to help if I was assured my contribution would be accepted.

see above. appstore apps cannot depend on external programs, so we
need to ship the whole JRE, something I'd rather not want to do..

So no hard feelings about replacing libxslt, but I don't think there's
a good alternative that doesn't add runtime dependencies, and
launching a JRE for e.g. a document filter also doesn't seem
compelling from a performance standpoint..

ciao
Christian