Questions about libxml2 and GnomeVFS support in libgsf

[Dave Malcolm <david davemalcolm demon co uk>]

I've started looking through libgsf in Gnome's CVS with a view towards
using it in Conglomerate.

Currently we have a half-hearted attempt to use GnomeVFS for loading and
saving files.  This works for simple cases involving absolute paths, but
fails if the user tries to specifies relative paths at the command line
(e.g. "conglomerate foo.xml"), or the file contains entities with
relative paths (e.g. a large DocBook document represented as book.xml
which merely includes chapter1.xml, chapter2.xml, etc using entities),
perhaps as siblings inside a tarball or via ftp or something.

I've had a brief look at the files gsf-libxml.h and .c within libgsf

So if I take a GnomeVFS URI, use gsf_input_gnomevfs_new_uri to create a
GsfInput from it, then use gsf_xml_parser_context to create a libxml2
SAX context, should it "just work"?

Many of the SAX hooks in gsf-libxml.c are NULL.  Also, libgsf seems to
have no concept of relative paths for me to use...

So I suspect there may be some issues to be solved.

Also:  are Gnome Office apps required to use GnomeVFS? or libgsf?

Dave Malcolm