Re: Yelp fails to display DocBook files

["Michael M." <nixlists writemoore net>]

Red Blue wrote:
> > From: "Michael M." <nixlists writemoore net>
> > To: gnome-list gnome org
> > Subject: Re: Yelp fails to display DocBook files
> > Date: Sun, 09 Apr 2006 22:36:53 -0700
> > >
> > I'm getting something similar with Gnome 2.14 in Debian Sid.
>
> Is that amd64 or another arch?

Just regular ol' i386 ... though, actually, the kernel is 486.  I have 
an AMD64 machine, but I haven't installed the port yet.  I'll let others 
do the heavy lifting, since in these matters I am a lightweight. :-)

> I'm trying to figure out what the commonality is, because quite 
> obviously this is not a common problem (I've scoured the net a lot 
> before turning to this list and basically there have been only a few 
> similar cases with Mac OS X ports and one mention in gnome-vfs-list from 
> 2004, about some path variable, which apparently is not in use anymore).

Funny, I ran Debian Sarge and Etch (and Ubuntu Breezy) PPC ports on my 
iMac and never encountered this problem.  But I guess I wasn't doing it 
as long ago as 2004.

> > At first, it displayed only the main menu and any attempt to click on 
> > an item produced an error message.  Now most or all of the menu 
> > structure seems to be intact, but clicking on an item brings up a raw 
> > XML page in my browser.
>
> I got to that point too by just opening one of the XML files with 
> Mozilla. The unrendered XML page has the header warning "This XML file 
> does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The 
> document tree is shown below." Now every time I open some DocBook by 
> clicking it from Yelp, it comes out like that from Mozilla. If I feed 
> the path to Yelp through console ("yelp /foo/bar"), then I get the 
> "There is no default action" error.

I just tried that and I get "An unknown error has occurred.  The 
specified location is invalid."  That's the error I was getting before, 
directly from the Yelp application, before it started opening the XML 
file in Mozilla.

> My understanding is that Yelp should do an XML->HTML conversion using 
> the XSLT style sheets from gnome-doc-utils, but this step is not 
> happening for either of us, and there apparently are no detailed error 
> messages or logs available from Yelp to help in pinpointing where the 
> failure occurs.

Your understanding is a lot more advance than mine.  I tried using w3m 
on a sample XML file and I got the same document tree I get in Mozilla. 
 I tried "$ cat foo.xml | w3m -T text/html" and I get the text of the 
document all run together without any formatting at all, though at least 
it's not the document tree.

I have been presuming it will right itself one day, but perhaps I'm 
wrong if not many others are having this problem.  I also have an issue 
with manpages-dev not installing every time I run aptitude update.  dpkg 
throws out an error message, and the next time I go to update, aptitude 
tries again to install it, so far unsuccessfully.  It's probably just a 
coincidence, but it does seem ironic that the only two problems I've had 
since moving from Etch to Sid are with sub-systems that are *supposed* 
to help users.


--
Michael M. ++ Portland, OR ++ USA
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions 
of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to 
dream." --S. Jackson