Extracted from the documentation: http://xmlsoft.org/FAQ.html#Compilatio Compilation 1.What is the process to compile libxml ? As most UNIX libraries libxml follows the "standard": gunzip -c xxx.tar.gz | tar xvf - cd libxml-xxxx ./configure --help to see the options, then the compilation/installation proper ./configure [possible options] make make install At that point you may have to rerun ldconfig or similar utility to update your list of installed shared libs. At this point you can check that the library is properly functionning by running make tests 2.What other libraries are needed to compile/install libxml ? Libxml does not requires any other library, the normal C ANSI API should be sufficient (please report any violation to this rule you may find). However if found at configuration time libxml will detect and use the following libs: libz: a highly portable and available widely compression library http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/zlib/ iconv: a powerful character encoding conversion library. It's included by default on recent glibc libraries, so it doesn't need to be installed specifically on linux. It seems it's now part of the official UNIX specification. Here is one implementation of the library which source can be found here. http://clisp.cons.org/~haible/packages-libiconv.html ftp://ftp.ilog.fr/pub/Users/haible/gnu/ 3.make tests may fail on some platforms Sometime the regression tests results don't completely match the value produced by the parser, and the makefile uses diff to print the delta. On some platforms the diff return breaks the compilation process, if the diff is small this is probably not a serious problem Daniel veillard@redhat.com $Id: INSTALL,v 1.4 2006/03/24 14:02:54 veillard Exp $