Re: Detecting stylesheets and DTDs

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On Sun, 20 Jan 2002, Jody Goldberg wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 19, 2002 at 07:02:42PM -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> >
> > Is the real root problem that we don't have a canonical upstream
> > stylesheet/dtd package, and that these packages therefore seem to vary
> > by distribution?
> yes.

It appears that Norman Walsh only packages the stylesheets and DTD as a
simple zip file without any configure script, build setup, or catalog
registration.  Thus, it is up to each distribution to produce packages.

I just inspected the Red Hat packages from Rawhide and I am not surprised
that few distributions have gotten it done yet.  It is quite a bit longer
than your average spec file, with many %post and %postun scripts for
catalog registration.

> There are 2 issues that need to be addressed
> 1) We need a canonical package the the distributions can include
> which will ensure that all necessary style sheets are available and
> registered.

This is a serious void.  I just tried to cobble together a very crude
first attempt at making tarballs, starting from the SRPMs out of Rawhide.
There's no autoconf.  Just cross your fingers and do 'make install' as
root.  If it works, you should get paths for:

(a) xmlcatalog /etc/xml/catalog "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"

and

(b) xmlcatalog /etc/xml/catalog
http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/html/chunk.xsl

and the files they refer to should actually be on your machine.

You can grab the tarballs from:
http://bliss.uchicago.edu/muet/linux/docbookx412.tgz
http://bliss.uchicago.edu/muet/linux/docbook-xsl-1.48.tgz

Tell me if these work for you, and feel free to fix them up if you like.

> 2) We need a build script that is not cut-n-pasted through
> generations of packages.

We maintain two reference build scripts in CVS, one for each of SGML and
XML docs, in gnome-docu/gdp/gdp-example1/help/*mldocs.make.  These scripts
should be usable by most or all GNOME packages without modification.  The
caviot to this currently, and in the past, is that the SGML and XML
documentation tools have been evolving with time and vary somewhat from
distribution to distribution.  If anybody finds that these makefiles don't
work on a particular distribution, they should update gdp-example1.

The promise of DocBook/XML and the LSB is that we should lose many of the
old dependencies and problems and get a good standardized catalog system
and libxml2/libxslt in their place.  Unfortunately most
packagers/distributions have not bothered to install things properly.

Dan