Re: Minutes of Gnome 2 release team meeting (late): 2002-05-17

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Tue, May 28, 2002 at 04:57:07PM +0800, James Henstridge wrote:
> Daniel Veillard wrote:
> Daniel, I am not trying to be confrontational about this.  I was trying 
> to point out that:
> 
>    1. if you make use of http:// urls for resources, you shouldn't be
>       surprised if http requests are made on systems that don't have a
>       correctly setup catalog.

    purely an application level issue. You can block HTTP or FTP etc ...
 or even invent your own catalog mechanism.

>    2. if you use file:// urls, then this problem goes away, but you run
>       into the problem that your documents loose their system
>       independence, which is the reason why http:// identifiers were
>       being used for the resources in the first place.

    system independance in the very large sense, OS, application, toolchain,
data location ...

>    3. having a correctly configured catalog solves both the system
>       independence and no network access requirements quite elegantly.

    and the reason why I advocated using it. It's also a standard admiteddly
 still being in the deployment phase

> (I probably didn't make myself clear enough).  I think the best solution 
> is to require a working catalog (as we do now).  It shouldn't be 
> difficult to add the checks to make sure that this is so.  The commands 
> Malcolm posted could easily be converted to autoconf checks (make them 
> check all the catalogs in XML_CATALOG_FILES too, if that var is set), 
> and error out if the files can't be found.  The error message could even 
> point people at the simple to install docbook packages provided by the 
> scrollkeeper guys.

  this can even be made at runtime, like for example if the catalog
was destroyed or some data were removed or ... I gave the pointers
in bugzilla on the related bug.

> If having the stylesheets installed is considered to be a requirement 
> for yelp, then yelp's configure script should be erroring out if they 
> are missing.  At the moment, it sounds like many people are building and 
> installing yelp without an error, but missing the required docbook files.

  I explained how to make that test using the xmlcatalog command which is part
of libxml2 package (on systems properly packaged :-( )

> >  No, that's a policy, I won't implement such a policy in the library,
> >but apps should feel free to do so if they can.
> >
> This might be worth investigating for yelp (in the post 2.0 timeframe). 
>  There is always the possibility that some docs that are registered with 
> scrollkeeper will reference some resource we don't have (maybe some kde 
> documentation?).  Caching these would improve the speed of loading those 
> documents and from what you said above, libxml2 already provides the 
> hooks necessary to do this.

  Hooks, yes. I was hoping the LSB discussion could get some scheme for this
but one year ago most of the participants in that discussion didn't even got
a clue about the problem at stake.

  But I can said whatever I want, if people don't even care to listen, I'm
not gonna code that part the "trial and error" process can be applied
safely and there is a lot of things to do wrong :-(

Daniel

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