diff --git a/dev-libs/libxml2/libxml2-2.8.0.recipe b/dev-libs/libxml2/libxml2-2.8.0.recipe
index f4a143cd6..8acd7b29c 100644
--- a/dev-libs/libxml2/libxml2-2.8.0.recipe
+++ b/dev-libs/libxml2/libxml2-2.8.0.recipe
@@ -1,38 +1,126 @@
-DESCRIPTION="libxml2 - Version 2 of the library to manipulate XML files" 
+SUMMARY="The XML C parser and toolkit of Gnome"
 HOMEPAGE="http://www.xmlsoft.org/" 
+LICENSE="MIT"
+COPYRIGHT="1998-2003 Daniel Veillard.  All Rights Reserved."
 SRC_URI="ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxml2/libxml2-2.8.0.tar.gz"
 CHECKSUM_MD5="c62106f02ee00b6437f0fb9d370c1093"
 REVISION="1"
-STATUS_HAIKU="stable"
-DEPEND=""
+ARCHITECTURES="x86_gcc2 ?x86"
+
+PATCHES="libxml2-2.8.0.patch"
+
+PROVIDES="
+	libxml2 = $portVersion compat >= 2
+	cmd:xml2_config = $portVersion compat >= 2
+	cmd:xmlcatalog = $portVersion compat >= 2
+	cmd:xmllint = $portVersion compat >= 2
+	lib:libxml2 = $portVersion compat >= 2
+	"
+REQUIRES="
+	haiku >= $haikuVersion
+	zlib
+	"
+BUILD_REQUIRES="
+	$REQUIRES
+	cmd:aclocal
+	cmd:autoconf
+	cmd:automake
+	cmd:gcc
+	cmd:ld
+	cmd:libtoolize
+	cmd:make
+	"
+BUILD_PREREQUIRES="
+	haiku_devel >= $haikuVersion
+	"
+
+SOURCE_DIR="$portVersionedName"
+
+PATCH()
+{
+	# replace hard-coded references to the development documentation dir
+	sed -i "s,^DEVHELP_DIR=\(.*\),DEVHELP_DIR=${developDocDir}," \
+		doc/devhelp/Makefile.am
+	sed -i "s,%{_datadir}/gtk-doc/html/libxml2,${developDocDir},g" \
+		libxml.spec.in
+}
+
 BUILD()
 {
-	cd libxml2-2.8.0
 	libtoolize --force --copy --install
 	aclocal
 	autoconf
-	sed -i 's/$(datadir)\/aclocal/`finddir B_COMMON_DATA_DIRECTORY`\/aclocal/g' M*
 	automake
-	COMMON_DOCS=`finddir B_COMMON_DOCUMENTATION_DIRECTORY`
-	./configure --prefix=`finddir B_COMMON_DIRECTORY` \
-		--datarootdir=$COMMON_DOCS \
-		--docdir=$COMMON_DOCS/doc \
-		--mandir=$COMMON_DOCS/man
-		LDFLAGS="-lnetwork"
-	make
+	runConfigure ./configure LDFLAGS="-lnetwork"  \
+		--with-html-dir=$docDir/html \
+		--with-html-subdir=""
 }
 
 INSTALL()
 {
-	cd libxml2-2.8.0
 	make install
+
+	# prepare develop/lib
+	prepareInstalledDevelLibs libxml2
+	fixPkgconfig
+	mv $libDir/xml2Conf.sh $developLibDir/
 }
 
 TEST()
 {
-	cd libxml2-2.8.0
 	make tests
 }
 
-LICENSE="MIT"
-COPYRIGHT="1998-2003 Daniel Veillard.  All Rights Reserved."
+DESCRIPTION="
+	Libxml2 is the XML C parser and toolkit developed for the Gnome project 
+	(but usable outside of the Gnome platform), it is free software available 
+	under the MIT License. XML itself is a metalanguage to design markup 
+	languages, i.e. text language where semantic and structure are added to 
+	the content using extra "markup" information enclosed between angle 
+	brackets. HTML is the most well-known markup language. Though the library 
+	is written in C a variety of language bindings make it available in other 
+	environments.
+
+	Libxml2 implements a number of existing standards related to markup 
+	languages:
+
+    - the XML standard: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml
+    - Namespaces in XML: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/
+    - XML Base: http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlbase/
+    - RFC 2396 : Uniform Resource Identifiers
+    - XML Path Language (XPath) 1.0: http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath
+    - HTML4 parser: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
+    - XML Pointer Language (XPointer) Version 1.0: http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr
+    - XML Inclusions (XInclude) Version 1.0: http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/
+    - ISO-8859-x encodings, as well as rfc2044 [UTF-8] and rfc2781 [UTF-16] 
+      Unicode encodings, and more if using iconv support part of SGML Open 
+      Technical Resolution TR9401:1997
+    - XML Catalogs Working Draft 06 August 2001: 
+      http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec-2001-08-06.html
+    - Canonical XML Version 1.0: 
+      http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-c14n and the Exclusive XML Canonicalization 
+      CR draft http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-exc-c14n
+    - Relax NG, ISO/IEC 19757-2:2003, 
+      http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/relax-ng/spec-20011203.html
+    - W3C XML Schemas Part 2: Datatypes REC 02 May 2001
+    - W3C xml:id Working Draft 7 April 2004
+
+	In most cases libxml2 tries to implement the specifications in a 
+	relatively strictly compliant way. As of release 2.4.16, libxml2 passed 
+	all 1800+ tests from the OASIS XML Tests Suite.
+
+	To some extent libxml2 provides support for the following additional 
+	specifications but doesn't claim to implement them completely:
+
+    - Document Object Model (DOM) http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/ 
+      the document model, but it doesn't implement the API itself, gdome2 
+      does this on top of libxml2
+    - RFC 959 : libxml2 implements a basic FTP client code
+    - RFC 1945 : HTTP/1.0, again a basic HTTP client code
+    - SAX: a SAX2 like interface and a minimal SAX1 implementation compatible 
+      with early expat versions
+
+	A partial implementation of XML Schemas Part 1: Structure is being worked 
+	on but it would be far too early to make any conformance statement about 
+	it at the moment.
+	"
diff --git a/dev-libs/libxml2/patches/libxml2-2.8.0.patch b/dev-libs/libxml2/patches/libxml2-2.8.0.patch
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..6973091ea
--- /dev/null
+++ b/dev-libs/libxml2/patches/libxml2-2.8.0.patch
@@ -0,0 +1,26 @@
+diff -ur libxml2-2.8.0.orig/configure.in libxml2-2.8.0/configure.in
+--- libxml2-2.8.0.orig/configure.in	2012-05-23 10:33:55.027787264 +0200
++++ libxml2-2.8.0/configure.in	2013-04-26 13:50:43.429391872 +0200
+@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
+ dnl Process this file with autoconf to produce a configure script.
+ AC_PREREQ(2.59)
+ AC_INIT(entities.c)
+-AM_CONFIG_HEADER(config.h)
++AC_CONFIG_HEADERS(config.h)
+ AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR([m4])
+ AC_CANONICAL_HOST
+ 
+diff -ur libxml2-2.8.0.orig/Makefile.am libxml2-2.8.0/Makefile.am
+--- libxml2-2.8.0.orig/Makefile.am	2012-05-23 10:56:18.030932992 +0200
++++ libxml2-2.8.0/Makefile.am	2013-04-26 13:50:43.432537600 +0200
+@@ -1208,8 +1208,8 @@
+ #
+ # Install the tests program sources as examples 
+ #
+-BASE_DIR=$(datadir)/doc
+-DOC_MODULE=libxml2-$(VERSION)
++BASE_DIR=$(docdir)
++DOC_MODULE=
+ EXAMPLES_DIR=$(BASE_DIR)/$(DOC_MODULE)/examples
+ 
+ install-data-local: