When upgrading to Plone 4.2, what versions of libxml2 and libxslt should be used with lxml 2.3.4?

Question

When upgrading to Plone 4.2, what versions of libxml2 and libxslt should be used with lxml?

Answer 1

Plone does not set any requirements beyond lxml itself. So, if you meet the requirements listed on the lxml installation page, you meet the requirements for Plone 4.2.

In summary, lxml requires libxml 2.6.21 or later, and libxslt 1.1.15 or later. In detail, I quote the lxml installation page:

• libxml 2.6.21 or later. It can be found here: http://xmlsoft.org/downloads.html
  
  • We recommend libxml2 2.7.8 or a later version.
  • If you want to use XPath, do not use libxml2 2.6.27.
  • If you want to use the feed parser interface, especially when parsing from unicode strings, do not use libxml2 2.7.4 through 2.7.6.
• libxslt 1.1.15 or later. It can be found here: http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/downloads.html
  
  • We recommend libxslt 1.1.26 or later.

Debian and Ubuntu have libxml2 2.7.8 (Ubuntu has had that version since Natty), and libxslt1.1 1.1.26 (all the way back to Lucid); most other Linux distributions will have matching packages.

On Windows, the lxml egg has been statically linked against the correct libxml and libxslt versions, so you don't need to bother with versions there.