Bugzilla Bug 116120

recently found out that portage did not tell me to also emerge libxml2 for
getting the compilation of the gnome-panel working. it was not needed for 2.10,
but it obviously is for 2.12. i never did a "emerge gnome" or "emerge
gnome-light"; i just wanted to use the gnome-panel for xfce. a emerge --pretend
gnome/gnome-light didn't tell me to emerge libxml2 too though.

did you have libxml installed already?

can you provide an error log?

If you already had it installed, this is probably a dupe.

no, i haven't installed libxml before, and unfortunately, i cannot provide an
error log. i thought this was not necessary since it was clear to install
libxml2 to get it working and this is only a minor bug, isn't it?

I have also incountered this problem, where python would error out
"ImportError: No Module named libxml2". Emerging libxml2 would fix the problem,
however, it seems the gnome-panel ebuild is missing this dependancy.

*** Bug 118955 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I've investigated this issue a bit more.

gnome-panel deps on libgnomeui deps on libbonoboui deps on libxml2.

Therefore, you should have libxml2 installed.  If you did NOT have libxml2
installed, you would have gotten this error:
checking for PANEL... configure: error: Package requirements blah blah were not
met.

This is because it would have tried to get the pkg-config flags, and failed
when it got to libgnomeui-2.0 and received the following error:
Package libxml-2.0 was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `libxml-2.0.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable.
Package `libxml-2.0', required by ' libbonoboui', not found

and not the ImportError.

Therefore, you either:
1) forgot to run python-updater after upgrading python
2) have -python in your use flags.

I have committed an updated ebuild to fix the 2nd case only.  

gnome-panel does not directly depend on libxml2.

*** Bug 123652 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***