magento/magento2 — pull request #179 by barbazul (2012-12-29 01:31:37+00:00)
Title: Fix that makes Mage_Install compatible with the new version of SimpleXml

Te new version of SimpleXml breaks the installation because it parses empty nodes differently. I am not very sure about the specifics of this but this issue has been reported all over the forums, StackOverflow, etc and its a very small fix