RFC: Testing Nokogiri against libxml-rs - memory-safe libxml2

[infinityabundance]

Hi Nokogiri team,

I built libxml-rs - a native-Rust, forensic reimplementation of
libxml2 + libxslt + EXSLT + xsltproc, C ABI compatible.

Repo: https://github.com/infinityabundance/libxml-rs
Crate: https://crates.io/crates/libxml-rs (0.1.0-alpha.11)
Debian ITP: https://bugs.debian.org/1146060

WHY

• libxml2 is unmaintained since Dec 2025, very CVE-prone
• I need it for bind9-rs (memory-safe BIND rewrite) - BIND 9.20
  requires libxml2 for statistics-channels
• Nokogiri is one of the biggest downstream users, so parity
  with you matters a lot

STATUS - Phase 9 complete

libxml2:
- parser + SAX, tree, XPath 1.0, DTD/XSD/RELAX NG/Schematron
- C14N, Reader/Writer, HTML, Catalog, XInclude

libxslt + EXSLT:
- Full XSLT 1.0 + all 7 EXSLT modules (exsl:node-set with real RTF)
- exsltRegisterAll() exported
- xsltproc CLI with full options + upstream exit codes 1-11

Testing:
- 1110 lib tests, 0 failures
- 12-case xsltproc corpus byte-identical to libxslt 1.1.45
- ABI courts (struct/symbol/enum) passing
- Oracle: Docker builds libxml2 2.12.0 + libxslt 1.1.39 from source,
contamination-free

ASK

Would you be open to a CI job that builds Nokogiri against it?

bundle config build.nokogiri --use-system-libraries
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/libxml-rs/target/debug
bundle exec rake test

Or if you prefer, I can run your test suite here and post logs.
No flag-day replacement - this is for Debian experimental as an
alternative provider of libxml2.so.2 / libxslt.so.1.

Thanks for maintaining Nokogiri for so long. Happy to adjust the
C ABI if you hit anything.

Best,
Riaan - https://github.com/infinityabundance