These are unnecessary and probably dangerous. I don't see any immediate
risk situations in the core XML support or contrib/xml2 itself, but there
could be issues with external uses of libxml2, and in any case it's an
accident waiting to happen.
Prior to 8.3, these changes are not critical for compatibility with core
Postgres, since core had no libxml2 calls then. However there is still
a risk if contrib/xml2 is used along with libxml2 functionality in Perl
or other loadable modules. So back-patch to all versions.
Also back-patch addition of regression tests. I'm not sure how many of
the cases are interesting without the interaction with core xml code,
but a silly regression test is still better than none at all.
I have changed the name of the new parse function to xml_valid and fixed
a reference to SortMem which meant that the code as supplied would work
against 7.3 and 7.4 but wouldn't work in CVS.
